Is MuseScore 4 the Sibelius Killer?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 มิ.ย. 2024
- I spent a couple of days with MuseScore 4, after working with Avids Sebelius for over 10 Years and here is what I thought...
(100% FREE) MuseScore 4: musescore.org/en
00:00 Intro
00:26 What is MuseScore
01:13 Playback
01:35 Muse Hub
02:23 MuseScore Vs DAW/Samples
03:31 First Look at MuseScore 4
06:23 MIDI Keyboard Players
08:27 Changing/Solo Instruments
09:19 The Problems
11:13 Muse Sounds AUDIO/MUSIC DEMO
11:56 Exporting MIDI/MusicXML - to Sib/DAW
13:20 Final Verdict - เพลง
It doesn't even matter if Sibelius is better than Musescore right now or not. All that matters is that musescore is still getting better rapidly whereas Sibelius has been stuck on 7 for years, and Sibelius is an overpriced subscription service with noteperformer being another additional price while Musescore is totally free. It's a matter of when, not if, Musescore surpasses Sibelius as the industry standard.
Yes, it is! I worked the last 15 Years with Sibelius. Now changed to musescore. And it is great!
i'm thinking of this as well, how it was your transition? i've used Sibelius since v3.
@trmus I’ve moved more towards Dorico, but because I’ve used Sibelius for so long I keep finding myself going back when I need to do something quickly just because I know if so well
Musescore is open source, so community can suggest improvements and features and point out features.
@@_v_m_ you don’t understand what open source means…
@@_v_m_ I think you're underestimating the Muse Group team! This change occurred not over the lifetime of the project, but over 3 years. They immediately began working on fine-tuning the project as soon as it was released, so you can expect massive improvements. I hear the current head of Muse Group is a guitarist so that might be the next instrument to get the MuseSounds treatment. They also are almost ready to release an Audacity overhaul, so watch out for that!
6:50 "n" is the shortcut for inputing notes
Thank you 🙏
Compared to what was available in the 90's - this is GOLD.
To be fair, this is the VERY first release of a complete overhaul. They released it with the expectation to fine-tune it through community feedback and suggestions.
Completely agree, I think I say it at the end, their really good a listening to the community and fixing bugs as time goes by, I really should do an updated video on this software 😂 a lot has changed
Musescore 3 had the possibility to have different dynamics in the piano staffs. Maybe they will add it later on. Also Musescore 3 had the possibility to change the dynamic of any note individually in the inspector, MS 4 does have the input window for it, but it has no effect yet and always jumps back to the default.
Hopefully teething issues, thank you for the added input! :)
Also copying and pasting is way easier than you made it seem. Hold Shift and Then hold left click after, while you drag and highlight what you wanna copy and paste. You can also click a measure and copy all of the measure. If you hold ctrl+the down arrow, you actually lower an octave, same for ctrl+up arrow you bring it an octave higher, and 'r' repeats the highlighted selection, using Shift+n gives tenuto, Shift and O is Marcato, Shift and V is Accent, etc. Ctrl+less than and greater than is dimuendo and crescendo. You can essential use shortcuts all through musescore.
A comparison video with Musescore 4 sounds, Sibelius and Noteperformer would be great!
I’ll let you know when the video comes out! Should be before the end of the month
great review. Thank you
Great review! Thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Clicking the ''N' key will make you edit notes, youll be able to place them without clicking the pencil icon
Interesting - Thanks !
So I'm not new to Musescore, But I am new to the concept of VST. I want to improve the sounds of my music and I'm trying to figure out about these VST software applications. One has caught my eye, JABB 3. So if I purchase and install this product, Will musescore recognize it and then use the sounds directly from that application? I would be able to use the musescore mixer to assign instruments to the JABB instruments? I don't want to make a significant financial investment into something only to find out it doesn't work the way that I am thinking it should. Any advice on using VST with musescore would be helpful.
In short yes you can, you have to go into the MuseScores mixer and where it says sound, select that and change it to your sample library of choice. My advice would be however to learn how to use a DAW (Reaper or audacity are free) and transfer your score into a DAW (I do videos on this) you will have a lot more flexibility and overall get a better final sound. There are also many free VSTs out there, spitfire audio LABs are a good place to start, before you invest in any paid ones. Hope this helps.
I've been using MuseScore v4 for a few days now. Very impressive for the most part. I started using it at version 3.5. In terms of free Music Notation software MuseScore is easily the most impressive in my opinion. The fonts, the engraving, and the overall notation features are solid and some very impressive. Ease of use is solid across the board.
Version 4 fixes some MIDI issues, mostly note input is much easier providing MS reads your keyboard. Great update on the sounds. They take a while to download and I have some VST sounds that are better. Frankly some of the old MS sound fonts were pretty good for just getting your ideas down. But it is so much easier with the new Mixer in v4 to set your sounds.
There are some bugs. I was testing with a marching band score and while all my marching percussion (snare, quads, basses, cymbals) were showing in the score they were not showing in the mixer. The hide/show feature was set to show. So I could not mix my percussion or set the VST sounds. Wasn't sure if there was a limitation with the mixer or some bug. Overall this is not an issue for me since I usually mix the audio mock-up in Reaper. A DAW like that is simply better built for that type of task. But I love that MuseScore has made it simpler to use the mixer and to use 3rd party VST libraries and their own sounds.
When it comes to using your own VST libraries I have not found a way to use multi-channel VST software like Kontact player or like my Miroslav mixer where you can setup 8 to 16 sounds, assign midi channels, audio channels, and then have MuseScore let you assign to those different sounds on different MIDI channels. I do have the Spitfire Discover Orchestra (their low-coast version) and because of how that works with each sound being an instance of the player it works perfectly with MuseScore. So I highly recommend that if you just need to hear some good sounds that run fast with little memory overhead. To be fair I did not expect they would have multi-channel VST player support. But you can load just about any VST player or program...you will just have to use ONE sound source only. For now. I am sure that support will be coming, but like I said for a free program the features already in MS are first rate.
Is MuseScore ready to take down Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, even Notion? Depends on what you are looking for and how you work. In terms of final output (music notation) MS is top notch. It can format, looks amazing, the fonts and type-setting, score formatting, part extraction, and printing or exporting to PDF (as well as audio output) are very solid and as good as most others out there. Note input, articulations, dynamics, text and more are easy and intuitive. On that front it will get the job done.
it does not have some of the advanced features found in Dorico, Finale, Sibelius, but it likely very close to Notion and better in certain areas. Not a fair comment since I have only tried the demo of Notion and I did like it.
I would still rank Music Notation programs as follows:
1. Dorico ($$$ costly but worth it) - best and most powerful overall but for professionals with solid MIDI/Audio understanding who also need the best in notation tools and layout...otherwise it can be overkill. They do have a light version. This is where we are seeing the most innovative tools being developed for music notation. Very professional software being developed by the team that initially created Sibelius. Steinberg has been funding this project for some time now.
2. Finale ($99 education price, $250 full) - not as intuitive as Sibelius or Dorico, but under the hood Finale is still a Mercedes...albeit with a sort of old Toyota interface. I give it the nod over Sibelius because of support, update releases, and the company is extremely friendly to music educators. You have to learn the tools but once you do it is fast. Mixer is improved, but not as simple as MuseScore or Notion. Dorico has the most professional mixer but that is a very PRO program. On a whole I still give Finale high props. It's a deep program that can handle very high-end notation.
3. Sibelius ($lease or a one-time buy of $450 or so) - great look and feel. Flows very musically. Not as many updates anymore though I was glad to see Avid doing their best to keep the software up to date. Pricing model is costly but I honestly think a lot of music software is heading this direction. It does not have all the features under the hood that Finale does but it is easier to use...and it will do most anything you need it to. Hate the mixer and I have hated it since the early days of version 3. It plays nicely with VST plugins but there are many bugs. I stopped using Sibelius after version 7.
4. Tie: MuseScore (Free for now) and Notion ($150 or so) - see my writeup above about the latest MuseScore 4. For getting work done and meeting most of the notation needs MuseScore 4 is an ace. It is easy and intuitive and I think the redesign of the interface is fantastic. Should be much easier for folks to work with. For poor college music students and teachers this should be the go to program. There are some bugs which is standard for new software. That will get hammered out over time. The online community of help, the ability to upload music and share and so much more I think MuseScore should be the standard for educators worldwide. Many others will use it as well.
Notion is a program I only tested. I did like it and its mixer and MIDI implementation is outstanding. I think MS4 is better for note entry but it is close. Notion likely has better support for MIDI keyboards and setting sounds is easier. It definitely feels more polished but it is a paid-for program. I like the manuscript look and layout better on MS4, but notion is good. So I see them as a tie for now. Not a fair comparison to be honest since I have been using MuseScore for about 2.5 years now and only used Notion for 30 days.
Muse score will always be free due tu it's gpl2 license.
So what are the advanced features in Sibelius and Dorico which are lacking in MuseScore? There are certainly more third party plugins which do very specific things. What else? The only thing I can think of is diy scripting for nerdy composers.
I have been a Musescore user for years and have always promoted it among my friends and colleagues. The update to Musescore 4 has made me for the first time look into alternatives because it has become pretty much unusable. The amount of crashes, bugs and errors I get, plus the limited capacity to implement things that were already perfectly usable in MS3 (like changing for concert pitch for transposing instruments and getting repetitions signs to playback) is extremely annoying. I am seriously considering paying for Sibelius because as of today, the errors and crashes in MS4 have made my workflow extremely slow.
What's your hardware look like? Just curious, I haven't seen much more than a bit of lag on 32 Gb RAM
10:10
Actually, you can use a tremolo for flutter tongue. There are work-arounds.
One thing I don't like about the playback is the glissandos that constantly happen with the legato. No way to get it to stop. And the choir and solo horn tend to be a little early.
Thanks for the comment, good to know!
I'm new to composing and I'm using Musescore4 and Garageband. How much modulation, articulation markers, etc should I add to a score in Musescore 4 before exporting the midi into Garageband? Wouldn't those markers only work for Musescore playback? Wouldnt I have to redo all the velocity, modulation, vibrato in Garageband since Musescore probably doesnt transfer those?
The only one that carry’s through is velocity, so just dynamics markings. Everything else you have to redo
@@Joe-blogcomposer Bummer, but not unexpected. Thank you!
@@Joe-blogcomposer I'm trying to write a quartet piece completely in Musescore 4 with Spitfire Solo Strings. No vocals or live recordings. So, Musescore 4 is essentially behaving as the DAW.
Can Musescore 4 control the modulation, expression, and vibrato of Spitfire Solo Strings via musical notation? How? I'm not having a lot of success. Do I have to map CCs somehow?
Can I get away with using Musescore 4 as a DAW in this case or am I just wasting time and effort adding any notation articulations that will need to be redone in DAW?
I do a whole video on using VSTs in MuseScore 4 | Working with VST
th-cam.com/video/-69utldyiRI/w-d-xo.html
Hope it helps, In short I wouldn’t recommend it as I couldn’t control all the parameters like vibrato and modulation
@@Joe-blogcomposer Ok, cool. I will check out the video. Thank you! You probably saved me a bunch of frustration
RIP avid
in its currently buggy mess of a state, musescore 4 is not going to usurp sibelius. the release was definitely pushed too soon, and as a result both musescore 4 and its new plugin muse sounds are both very buggy and very hard to use due to numerous bugs most of which lower performance and handling and make the use of the app harder and less desirable than sibelius which i have never found a single bug in in my years of us. im not a harcore sibelius fan, my roots stem from musescore and im an avid (pun intended) lover of musescore, but its current state is, i say, less than musescore 3, and i find myself opening musescore 3 rather than 4 because musesounds (which itself is very buggy and not very well fleshed out) does not outweight the bugs and laggy performance
I think most of your criticism boils down to you not knowing how to use the software.
musescore 4 is a hell for me, sure it has nice things but in general... oh nop, OH NO!!!! i hate it tbh, sibelius is a lot better.
Have you fed your particular criticisms back into the MuseScore community? Obviously it can't be all things to all people but if you have something to contribute by way of improvement I am sure they would at least listen.