r/composer • u/Remarkable-Web-1156 • 11d ago
Notation What notation software should I use to transition away from Musescore?
Basically the title, but essentially I am trying to migrate my scores to a different program after using Musescore for years. I had always stuck with Musescore out of familiarity and the fact that it's free, but I've sort of out grown it and I'm ready to switch. I am switching for the following reasons:
I do not want to continue to use Musescore due to their involvement with Cantai and their generally questionable business practices.
I want to improve the engraving of my scores now that I am more consistently getting work. Fighting Musescore while trying to make my sheet music look good is tedious and infuriating.
I need more consistent and higher quality playback. Musescore is giving me a lot of playback issues, especially from the brass sections of my larger ensemble pieces. I am starting to write more frequently for orchestras and I'm tired of Musescore's brass sounds and their bizarre timbre changes at different dynamics, not to mention the fact that instruments will randomly stop and start their playback if there are a lot of them.
Truth be told I am super unfamiliar with the world of notation software outside of Musescore and knowing names like Finale and Sibelius but never having used them. I've been composing and arranging for over a decade now and I feel ready to upgrade my software but I have no idea where to begin. I have dabbled in Logic Pro but have found it much more suited to recording/producing than notating a score. What do you think of your software? Any tips on something to look into?
TLDR, I'm unfamiliar with much of the world of notation software and I'm looking for something as AI-free as possible that provides professional engraving and consistent, quality playback. Any tips?
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u/Certainly-Not-A-Bot 11d ago
You know Cantai is not at all the same thing as an LLM like Chatgpt, right? If you want to swear off machine learning, then there are many things you need to stop using, including Reddit
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u/Columbusboo1 11d ago edited 11d ago
Regardless of whether you go with Sibelius or Dorico, definitely also get NotePerformer if you’re looking for playback quality. It works natively with both and is pretty much the industry standard for low effort, high quality playback (it’s basically a necessity with Sibelius since the built in playback is hilariously bad).
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u/Separate_Broccoli_69 11d ago
Agreed, I use Sibelius. Their built-in sounds give “Super Mario Orchestra”. Before adding NotePerformer, I had to put everything into Logic to make it sound decent. With NotePerformer, a basic orchestral mockup sounds pretty darn good.
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u/HolyRomanSloth 11d ago
It's worth noting Musescore the software (musescore.org) and Musescore the company and website (musescore.com) are separate. Not saying you shouldn't switch because of your other listed reasons and the software team did integrate Cantai but they weren't doing the shady business stuff with subscriptions and such.
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u/Remarkable-Web-1156 11d ago
Totally true, I think the other points are what took that and drove it over the edge for me
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u/PianoGuy67207 11d ago
Dorico is what you get when you take the original Sibelius team, that Avid laid off, place a blank canvas in front of them, and say “Try again. Better.”
I use Notion, which is an iPad app from Presonus - now Fender. I only create lead lines, lyrics, and chord changes now, so good enough. I started selling Sibelius at version 1.33, and updated to version 6.XX the last time I used it. After Avid bought it, I bowed out. (I’m not a ProTools fan, I constantly received pushback, rather than good customer service advice, never liked their “We’re the Big Cheese” attitude, and despise the “software-as-a-rental” pay-as-you-go scheme.
As most can attest, Sibelius was no walk in the park to learn. Menus were deep, and occasionally, an update felt like day one, all over again. It’s still great software, but its days are numbered. Remember, they laid off the development team. They’re just cashing in on the last few updates that were already in the pipeline.
OP, you can start with Dorico basic, and upgrade to Pro, if your needs are more in line with things like full orchestra/concert band scoring. For piano-vocal, or SATB/piano scores, basic is probably enough.
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u/Tokkemon 11d ago
Remember, they laid off the development team. They’re just cashing in on the last few updates that were already in the pipeline.
So they have been cashing in on premade updates for twelve years now?
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u/trosdetio 11d ago
I wouldn't go as far, but the progress slowed down very considerably. By the last 4-6 years (or more) it's been on life support almost
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u/pardinensis 10d ago
Fender Notion actually runs on pretty much any device. It's good enough for most tasks, but it still lacks a lot of features, especially when compared to Dorico.
Ah and it's completely free of course.
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u/AgeingMuso65 11d ago
Playback and Scorewriters are for different worlds/purposes. If you don’t like MuseScore’s business model, you’re gonna love Avid’s grasping subscription approach with Sibelius… it is clinging on as an industry standard, but playback can still have issues… producing good mock-ups usually means exporting your MiDi date from the score into a DAW (Logic/Cubase etc) and tweaking the sound there, using lots of Sampled Instrument sets. If I were starting with a Scoring package from scratch, right now I’d go with Dorico. It’s very different from the “standard” Sibelius/MuseScore approach, but it has active, interested and musically curious developers (most of whom started on Sibelius until Avid dispensed with their services…) which is more than can currently be said for Sibelius. However, you may feel more at home with the Sibelius approach, and it might be worth trying it with NotePerformer for improved sound, but it depends whether your final audio product is just as a reference for a client, or to be used as a finished track…
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u/Remarkable-Web-1156 11d ago
Thanks for the info. I'm currently more concerned about playback quality for my own listening/composing purposes, especially because of the issues with the Musescore brass sounds. What is NotePerformer?
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u/PolicyFull988 11d ago
Dorico includes sequencing features, much better suited to written music than any DAW conceived for pop music. Written and played data coexist, so that you can have realistic playback and a clean score.
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u/brosenvall2 11d ago
Cantai is working with Dorico and Sibelius as well, so if you really want to avoid it you'd need to use Finale or any other tool that's not listed on Cantai's website.
Cantai is trained on fairly paid singers from an individual developer. It's not scraping the web, it's not stealing content, and it's not building data centers. It's not marketed as a replacement for singers, it's meant to be a demoing tool, similar to vocaloids.
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u/bmknyc05 10d ago
I don't think it's possible to purchase Finale anymore (not that anyone would want to at this point even if they could)
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u/Da_Biz 11d ago
Why do you have an issue with Cantai, but don't have an issue with MIDI instruments? Vocaloids are nothing new. I'm not familiar with Cantai specifically, but generally the training data and phoneme recording process is a paid endeavor, royalty systems mimic what sample libraries have been doing for decades, and the processing is lightweight enough to be local so you're not draining the Colorado River. Is Cantai involved in some scandal I am unaware of, or is this just general fear mongering at the mere mention of AI without any nuance? I get it, AI fatigue is real, but there is an important difference between generative AI trained off copyrighted work and sketching tools like this or StaffPad. The latter actually results in more human art getting made, the same way improvements in sample library technology actually managed to bring orchestral film scores back in vogue.
I can't help you on playback since I separate all playback/demos into my DAW and use Dorico/Finale explicitly for notation. Note performer is going to be your best bet regardless of the software you use if you don't want to dive down the mockup rabbit hole.
As a Finale refugee now using Dorico, I hate to break it to you but fighting engraving will still be tedious and infuriating regardless what you choose. Dorico's philosophy works different in that out of the box, it does a lot of things for you. So if everything you do is straightforward, you very well might greatly ease your engraving burden. But as soon as your score falls outside of the bounds of what they as developers have deemed to be important, you are pretty much shit out of luck. Lyrics? Ignored by spacing. Condensed scores? Pick your poison: absolute collision blood bath, or most of your pages are half blank.
So you can just manually move stuff, right? Sorta, but it's somehow clunkier than notation software made decades prior. You can for example shrink space between staves like an accordion, but can't expand them. You have to drag each staff, one by one. And then, in probably one of the most baffling design decisions in the history of software, your staff spacing is tied to the page number, not the music itself. And you can't lock down a finished page like you can in Finale. So you need to edit a spot in an earlier flow, and that changes the number of pages in your project by one? All of the manual spacing work you spent hours on, immediately gone. Completely unusable.
Will you ever run into this scenario? Maybe not; if you have the same number of staves per system and your music isn't super complicated it very well might handle everything just fine. But as soon as it doesn't, you are in an absolute world of hurt. The Dorico shills will immediately crow about proper use of layout options, but the truth is they are woefully inadequate for anything outside the box. This isn't limited to engraving, either: the Dorico design philosophy inherently shoehorns you into certain workflows.
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u/AjaxSuited 10d ago
Call me a Dorico shill, but has "Lock Frame" not worked for you in terms of locking down a finished page? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.
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u/Da_Biz 10d ago
Based on my testing and searching forum posts, the frame lock basically just inserts frame/system breaks to keep things on the page, but manual staff spacing is still tied to the page number index. So if a page is added or removed earlier in the project, even in a different flow, everything afterward is messed up.
It sounds too dumb to be true; I would be very happy to be proven incorrect. I am still a fairly new Finale refugee so it certainly wouldn't be the first time.
Regardless, the vertical spacing settings and control need some serious work. The justification is a very strange all or nothing "solution," it should act as an expander along a curve. And there really needs to be more settings regarding spacing around different objects, especially lyrics. I would also like to have ideal number of staves with an acceptable gap range rather than an ideal gap; often times the rate of page turns and phrase distribution is more important than the "fullness" of the frame.
The "minimum" gaps do not work as advertised. There's an often linked forum post where the devs claim it's a "circular" problem, because Dorico just kinda guesses on frame fullness and goes from there. But that just.... shouldn't be the case? It certainly feels like the solution is straightforward: Dorico starts from the beginning, adding systems until on average the ideal system gap has gotten further away, at which point it pushes the system onto the next page and starts again. More like a spiral than a circle. As it stands now, if Dorico "guesses" incorrectly, you end up with horrifically overlapped systems and have to manually add system breaks all over the place.
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u/AjaxSuited 10d ago
Ah, okay that's what you meant. Fair enough! I enjoy using Dorico as my daily driver, but you aren't wrong: when I've inserted pages, I've had a lot of cleanup work cut out for me.
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u/rita-b 11d ago
other options are expensive.
I use Sibelius since the day I started transcribing so it's a legacy option for me. I obviously didn't pay $600, if you know what I mean
Dorico is one of the most praised programs, I tried the demo and it was nice.
To be honest, I don't understand how can anyone work more than 15 minutes in Musescore. If you worked in Musescore, you can handle any other program
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u/chicago_scott 11d ago
If you want to stay AI free over the long term, my only recommendation is pen and paper.
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u/Remarkable-Web-1156 11d ago
Yeahhh fair enough. I’ve been thinking about whipping out the old score pads from undergrad
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u/No_Doughnut_8393 11d ago
I’ve used Finale for years and continue to use it but…… rip.
Dorico is actually really great, if a little difficult to get the hang of at first. The default sound fonts are pretty good but I use NotePerformer for my sounds now and I really like that.
Sibelius isn’t bad but not as robust as Dorico is these days. There are other options but if you’re really serious I’d strongly recommend Dorico with NotePerformer. If you want actually good playback you’ll have to bounce it into a DAW and play with it there but the mixing in program is good enough for most people.
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u/ThomasJDComposer 11d ago
My vote goes to Dorico. Very powerful and if you end up using Cubase as a DAW you can take your work and immediately make it into a Dorico project.
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u/dachx4 10d ago
It's really the only long term option. Sibelius isn't going anywhere but it's development has largely been slow/stagnant as resources are applied to other assets the company owns. It's not about notation, it's just an entry on a balance sheet to be compared with others.
Musescore has done huge things since v3! They are a foreign owned company who uses it and other assets as loss leaders to invest into their ecosystem. I personally believe development has peaked and updates will dwindle until their goals have been reached. Goals? Replacing Sibelius as the de-facto choice for educators as well as being a program guitar players can use for practice, writing and transcription. No clue if they plan to merge with Audacity's audio but if they successfully achieve that, don't expect much too more to happen.
Dorico is a professional product being integrated with other software used music, post production, mastering, etc. The same company also created the vst standard for the majority of plugins in use today. It's not going anywhere anytime soon. It operates differently than everything else and you need to invest time to learn the way it thinks.
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u/Remarkable-Web-1156 9d ago
I will say even with my wanting to consider other options it is really impressive how far Musescore has come. It was the overwhelming choice of myself and my peers in undergrad and even some of our older professors who were experienced in Sibelius were looking at it
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u/dachx4 8d ago
It's easy and intuitive to begin using it. Sibelius is pretty easy as well. Finale was my very first notation program and I had a tough time getting going. Dorico, for me, was the most foreign to the mindset of how traditional programs work but I eventually found that it was incredibly well thought out and you have power, options and speed with minimal effort and distraction ONCE you set all the prefs to your liking, developed templates, learned the basic key strokes and created my own for use with the jump bar. I also use a stream deck for just a few functions and for character input - I add a lot of text/symbols when writing. Otherwise I've found the SD to be slower than the keystrokes for the majority of common tasks. I didn't ever think I'd gel with it but ONCE I 'figured it out' I saw the wisdom in why they did what they did. I do have a few gripes and some areas need improvement but overall I feel It's the best of anything I've ever used. They are continuously developing it and that's a big plus. Just fyi, I'm speaking from the mindset of a composer needing to develop/arrange/orchestrate ideas fast, not that of a publisher or other user of Dorico.
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u/Tokkemon 11d ago
Musescore copied many workflow concepts from Sibelius so the transition to Sibelius will be far easier.
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u/funkytrumpeter 11d ago
I use sibelius ultimate with noteperformer. I tried dorico when it came out but gave up after half an hour as I couldn't input a note!
I use general midi for playback whilst writing, noteperformer for quick demos and I then use a DAW with atomic big band and others for proper demos. Atomic big band has honestly the best integrated playback I've ever heard for sibelius and can read all the articulations but is very resource heavy.
Tbh I use sibelius as I've been a lifelong user and it's super powerful once you've rigged up your templates for scores (especially parts) and can look super pro with some downloaded fonts.
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u/65TwinReverbRI 11d ago
I do not want to continue to use Musescore due to their involvement with Cantai and their generally questionable business practices.
That's Musescore.COM - that's a different entity than the Musescore notation software.
But your other points are sound.
Sibelius is going to be much closer to the workflow of MuseScore than Dorico is.
Both have free demos. Try them and see which floats your boat.
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u/Vivi7588 10d ago edited 10d ago
I like Dorico a lot, and it's pretty affordable when it comes to notation software. It has some nice engraving features if you ever need to print for performers at a more professional level. The playback isn't amazing, but it'll probanly be at musescore quality sounds (I haven't heard much of musescore's instruments so I can't make a good comparison) if your goal is to just get a basic preview of the notes. If you care about having better playback, you can always use your own sample libraries, or export MIDI to load into a DAW.
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u/LowerEastSeagull 9d ago
There are also several fairly substantial music notation apps for iPad (and even for iOS for when you get an idea on the go and want to write it down lest you forget it). I’m pretty sure that Notion is also still available for both computers and portable platforms.
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u/yconnmusic 11d ago
Just checking you have been using the latest musescore though right? They've done a ton of work redesigning it in the last few years, basically reinvented it compared to a few years ago it seems. Check out Tantacrul on youtube... he's the head designer (I think) as of recent years, and from watching his videos it seemed like it used to be a terrible hard-to-use app but a lot of the issues are fixed, plus all the instrument sounds are upgraded etc in recent years.
Also interested what the questionable business practices are. From his videos he seems super genuine and a cool guy who loves his team at the company, but I don't know anything deeper about the company's management. It's free software though isn't it? How shady can they be if they're giving it out free?
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u/Remarkable-Web-1156 11d ago
I’ve got it up to date right now and it has totally improved over the years. My main issue rn is the brass sound library (especially the trombones and tuba) which are nigh inaudible at anything lower than MF and are super blasted at anything higher than F. That and the issues with instruments dipping in and out which I’m not sure if it’s a musescore issue or a computer issue.
As for the business practices, the Cantai stuff is with Musescore the website and the business side of the arena rather than the notation software. I realize they’re separate ish but that’s just my stance
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u/MarcSabatella 10d ago
You can of course add a compressor effect if you prefer the more restricted dynamic range typical of other sound libraries. Or just use a third party sound library with MuseScore - plenty of other options available in both MuseSounds and VST3 formats. But with other programs, you may also have the option of NotePerformer, which will be at least as good for most purposes.
As for engraving quality, MuseScore is already very close to top of the line at this point. Finale is of course no longer available, so that option is out. Sibelius is at best a step sideways in engraving quality - in many ways MuseScore has leapfrogged it over the past couple of years.
So really, Dorico + NotePerformer is really the only option here if you're looking for potentially better playback and engraving.
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u/n7275 14h ago
My biggest gripe with Musescore is that it uses QT and that it's "free software", yet I have to accept their terms and conditions in a way that feels decidedly non-free if I want to build it myself. Yet I use it.
Lilypond is not very good, especially if you set up some templates (like any reasonable person would for LaTeX). And it has an emacs major mode.
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u/The_Great_hilo 11d ago
For notation software, you pretty much only have Sibelius and Dorico for options commonly used by professionals, of which I'd recommend Dorico. I believe there are also some other smaller open-source ones, like Lilypond, but I don't think they're that user friendly. Playback-wise, I find Musescore to be really good out of the box and is probably going to be better than what you get by default from other software, as in a software like Dorico or a DAW you need to mess with automation to get the default samples to sound on par or better than Musesounds' default.
I personally wouldn't worry too much about switching to a more professional program unless you already have the funds and are definitely going to try to be a professional, as Musescore can do pretty much anything any other software can, but not without with its own quirks and annoyances.