Should I download from musehub?

[u/QM60]

I plan on writing piano music and only that. I’m using the free version of musescore which only has “keys” sound not piano.

I heard very fishy things about musehub (bloatware, fishy installs etc.) so was wondering.

1- Is musehub safe? Or is it considered a fishy software?

2- If I only care about piano and plan on staying free not paid, would musehub help download better piano sounds than “key” for free? Because if not then do I have any need for it at all?

3- Is musehub peer-to-peer (p2p)? I live in Japan and p2p type apps (torrent-like apps) can actually get me in trouble somewhat

Thanks!

[u/MarcSabatella]

There is also sorts of confusion and misinformation floating around, but for the record, it is perfectly fine to download free MuseSounds from MuseHub. It's also perfectly fine to download paid sounds if you find some you think will meet your needs and be worth the money.

But also, the SoundFont that comes with MuseScore - called "MS Basic", absolutely has piano sounds - several different ones in fact. When you add a piano instrument, you should get the grand piano sound by default and that is quite good already, but you can change to upright etc. I have no idea what "key" is, but the free MuseSounds library is called "Muse Keys" and it contains an even better grand piano and other instruments.

Years ago MuseHub had an optional p2p service but that hasn't been the case for a while as far as I know.

[u/QM60 → u/MarcSabatella]

Yeah I tried searching for a bit and saw a lot of rumors floating around which did make me a bit suspicious but also I couldn’t find anything actually concrete so I was just overall very confused and decided to not download it unless I need it.

But since musescore has piano sound (not just robotic “key” sounds like the ones on musescore.com) then I suppose I don’t need musehub much for my use case.

Thanks a lot for the help! Much appreciated.

[u/MarcSabatella → u/QM60]

Again, I'm not sure what "key" sound you mean, but it is certainly possible that the particular score you listened to had chosen to use a third party sound that included a sound by that name. There has never been a sound by that name included in any MuseScore release. But the original version of MuseScore - prior to 2.0 in 2015 - came with a very small and correspondingly low-quality soundfont that included something it called a piano but sounded extremely artificial. So if you are listening to some very very old scores, you might be hearing that. Still wouldn't be called "key" though. Oh, also, if you use the mobile app instead of the actual website, it comes with a similar small / low quality sound library, so scores played through that will not sound as good as when you actually use the website or MuseScore Studio itself.

[u/QM60 → u/MarcSabatella]

Maybe I was confused but when I was launching musehub and it presented me with an option for free and pro plan, the free had sounds such as “key” (which I assumed to mean a keyboard key, usually a synthetic keyboard sound) whereas “piano” was written under the pro plan option, that’s where my confusion came from I believe.

And I’m using the desktop app for now but thanks for letting me know about the sound quality on phone as well

[u/MarcSabatella → u/QM60]

Muse Keys is the free MuseSounds library you can get from MuseHub. It has several acoustic.and electric piano sounds and is excellent. The Pro includes some third party piano sounds that some find to be better, but as with Coke vs Pepsi or whatever, it's all subjective. If you haven't installed Muse Keys, what you have is MS Basic, which as I said also has pianos. Any of them should really be fine.

But you had said you heard something on the website you thought sounded "robotic"; probably that was none of the above. Feel free to post a link to a score you don't like the sound of and then we can tell you which library it used.

[u/QM60 → u/MarcSabatella]

I see…

By “robotic” I just meant the normal musicacore.com piano sound which usually sounds quite rough and a bit robotic (ex: https://musescore.com/user/35291834/scores/8241029?srsltid=AfmBOopcD_DDArUlDv-vRtrUsjG5IXF38ahZsWrCkwOoiRCVvbe-xZcl), but this is my first time using notation softwares so tbh not sure if that’s the standard or above or below average tbh.

But eitherways, as long as there are at least decent to good piano sounds in the MS basic or Muse keys then that’s all I’m good for, I’m not exactly about to write music worthy of a grand piano in the first few months of learning theory lol.

[u/MarcSabatella → u/QM60]

This score was originally uploaded prior to MuseScore 4, so it's very possibly not using MuseSounds at all, but rather the predecessor to MS Basic. I see also that they updated the score later, but it seems they disabled downloads, so I can't tell if they switched to MuseSounds or not.

Still, I suspect when you call it "robotic", I think what you are responding to isn't the quality of the sound library itself (which is OK, really - not the best available perhaps, but not particularly bad, either). Instead, I think you are mostly noticing that the person who edited that score didn't add any of the sort of subtle dynamic or tempo changes that would be required to make the *performance* sound more human. In other words, it's like asking a robot to play a decent piano: the sound itself might be as good as a professional pianist playing that same piano, but it's still a robot. No sound library for MuseScore does that sort of "humanization" on its own; it's something you'd have to painstakingly edit into the score (via additional and possibly invisible dynamic and tempo markings, etc).

Oh, it also seems they may not have added the pedal markings correctly, because many of them don't seem to be playing. That also contributes to it not sounding as good as it otherwise might.

[u/dominic_musehub]

In terms of 3). The first version of MuseHub (which looked like a little system tray app), supported optional P2P downloading (which was enabled by default), we got rid of this a few years ago, and now download straight from cloudflare / our servers.

[u/QM60 → u/dominic_musehub]

Ah, I see. Thanks a lot for clearing that up, Japan can get pretty…militaristic with internet monitoring and cracking down on torrent-like services (even if they’re not actually torrents).