![]() ![]() Our last workshop in Feb this year was given at the Royal Academy of Music in London.Ĭurrently MuseScore focuses on contemporary notation system. Occasionally, we go out and promote MuseScore at music conservatories and we give workshops. It’s one of the reason why MuseScore on Windows is delivered as a MSI, to ease this deployment. School network admins reach out to us to get help deploying MuseScore on Windows network. Many schools are using MuseScore and we mostly learn about this fact via a student’s tweet or support request in the MuseScore forum. Nicolas: We interact with educators and institutes via the same channels as with use with our users, that is email and via the MuseScore forum. How much and in what ways do you interact with educational institutions today? So far nobody took this challenge on to make it reality. The idea of a kickstarter to create samples and soundfont has been raised several times. Some developers have show interest on working on VSTi support, but so far no work started, and the license status of such an implementation, VST being a proprietary standard, is still unclear. We hope to be able to improve the internal synthesizers and to offer an even better connection to JACK for more demanding users. ![]() Any playback improvement shouldn’t go in the way of easily creating beautiful sheet music. We would love to work on a better playback in future versions, but we need to keep in mind that MuseScore is first and foremost about notating music. For piano scores, it gives a very good result. The SFZ sampler, Zerberus, has been implemented with the Salamander Piano soundfont in mind. For those used to the old soundfont, the quality will increase dramatically already in 2.0. Nicolas: MuseScore 2.0 comes with a new soundfont, derived from FluidR3GM, which was the default on Ubuntu, but not in most other distributions and on Mac and Windows. Should we expect you to continue improving built-in playback with regards to output quality? Maybe do a kickstarter to create a really high-quality soundfont with instruments recorded all in one place by the same engineer (that is, unlike the Sonatina SFZ frankensamples)? For the older sampler, you are still shipping an SF2 soundfont that is better, but still somewhat simplistic. One notable change in 2.0 is Zerberus - a new built-in SFZ sampler. When a decision is made and implemented, we use visual tests to make sure there are no regressions. Of course, music notation is far from an exact science even with a reference book, and sometimes we needed some discussion to find a compromise. The book helped us a lot to make things right. It happened repeatedly to Marc Sabatella during the development period of MuseScore, and so he worked on handling second intervals in multivoice context, stacking accidentals, beam groups etc.ĭuring the last development cycle, Elaine Gould published the “Behind Bars” book which is now recognized as a reference for music notation. Something looks wrong or broken, and a developer thinks he can fix it, so he scratches his own itch. Nicolas: The approach is the same than for any other open source software. What’s your approach to working on this? Do you mostly rely on input from users or do you run various continuous comparative tests? However, things seem to have improved with 2.0. ![]() MuseScore used to be criticized for score output quality. MuseScore’s goal remains to provide an affordable, easy to use music notation software which creates beautiful sheet music. MuseScore also provides some other features that they do not provide ( import of several formats for example). Nicolas: In term of features, we believe MuseScore covers the vast majority of the engraving features of the two software packages you mention, and these features are probably the most used ones. Where would you position MuseScore today? Back then, the app was often compared to Finale Notepad. My impression from our past conversation several years ago was that you didn’t intend to push MuseScore to take on Sibelius or Finale. Currently MuseScore will relayout the full score for any edit, we could optimize this. If I would have to pick a single one, it would be layout speed. But of course, being perfectionists, we do think there is still room for improvements. The core of MuseScore, a single code base, is running on the 5 major OSes of the moment. Nicolas: We are very happy with the outcome. Thomas Bonte and Nicolas Froment kindly replied all the questions.Īfter this much rewriting MuseScore, are you happy with the outcome, or do you still see some flaws in how MuseScore works internally and/or with regards to UI? A week ago, LGW already interviewed some of the MuseScore developers, when Open Well-Tempered Clavier project was released, but there is just so much to discuss when it comes to the score editor. ![]()
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