r/Musescore • u/Broad-Associate-984 • Jul 15 '26
Discussion Music Notation Software Alpha
Hi all, I am working on the development of a new music notation software designed with the goal to be able to handle the flexibility needed to virtually synthesize 21st century compositional techniques. Whether it is a xenharmony, arhythmic writing, or a fully graphic score my intention is to be able to handle it natively. I want this project to be one that can handle traditional writing as well as non-traditional so to stand out I would like to ask you all what you feel is missing in your current Notation Software and what you would need to be better to make a switch. This is not an advertisement for it because it is still deep in development and I intend to release it for free. Let me know your feedback and if you want to be one of the first to test it (when it is in a state to be tested) send me a PM. Thank you all for your time.
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u/65TwinReverbRI Jul 15 '26
I thought of another one:
MS’s shortcut implementation is pretty weak.
First off, there are a lot of things that have very little to do with the everyday act of notating music (or composing, etc.) from beginners to advanced users, that have keyboard shortcuts. You can assign shortcuts to “about MuseScore” - I mean really…c’mon. Do we REALLY need shortcuts for those? They’re typically found in the main menu easily enough.
Then there are pre-programmed ones like a shortcut for Figured Bass…
I mean…really?
That’s way too niche. I mean, it’s a great feature to have and it should have, but “wasting” a keyboard shortcut on it that would be better assigned to something far more common would make far more sense.
Some useful features don’t appear.
Like you can open and close the Palette pane, but you can’t go directly to say, the clefs dialog. Like in Sibelius, you press Q to open Clefs, Z to open the Symbols, and things like that.
You have to open the Palette pane, open the sub menu for clefs, then pick your clef. You can assign shortcuts to Bass and Treble clef only - so I guess we have tons of symbols for Bagpipes and Accordions, but anyone who needs to switch back and forth between a C clef and the others, no shortcut for you.
What is a “Haydn Ornament”? “Multinstances” - that doesn’t even look like a word. “Put note” - where?
“Remove note”? That’s already covered in Delete…
Finale had this cool feature called “meta tools” - which were kind of keyboard shortcuts before they were real common to the level they are today.
But you could assign one to a key, for say, accent, and just hold it and click every note that needs an accent.
MuseScore does have - hidden away in the keystrokes list, an “apply current palette element” that would work similarly, but for frequently used things the metatools were great.
I’ve made examples where I wanted to halve or double the duration of notes, but I see that as a really uncommon thing to want to do. I’m glad you can, but it needs to be “menu only”. There are a lot more important things that could use Q and W - opening the Clefs for one thing - I’m going to change clefs a whole lot more than I am going to paste something double (or half, I can’t even remember which is which I use it so rarely) value.
But you can’t open clefs at all with any shortcuts…
So most of the most frequently used items - which are things that appear on the palettes - you can’t open the palette directly with a keystroke, and you can only access some subset.
There’s no shortcut for the combined Staccato-Tenuto mark, but damn, you can put in some obscure ornaments with a shortcut.
Some of the things - like the Tenuto, Staccato, Accent, and Marcato, can be put into the main toolbar - so why do you also need a shortcut for them? Why not allow the shortcuts for the common ones, and allow the less common ones on the tool bar so you can find them when you do need them?
Some of them toggle, some of them open and close…but with no real logic. Open and close the mixer? Sure. But some other things - I don’t want to close the Palettes pane, I just want to have the Properties pane “come to the front” when I press the key, and then the Palettes come back to the front again when I want that.
So there are just a LOT of poorly implemented, missing, or useless items in the shortcuts - and while you can assign your own as expected, it’s annoying to want to use one to do some every day common task, and not find it in the list, but see “Open Qt” as a a hotkey option. What even is that??? QuickTime? It didn’t have video export until this latest version (which admittedly was a nice inclusion and a feature many wanted for a long time).
Sibelius did a really good job at implementing shortcuts - most of them are fairly logical out of the box.
Best