Orchestral Mockup in Musescore 4

[Carl Irwin]

I'm not going to be looking into the source code. My spare time is exclusively for writing music.

Why do you use Musescore and not something like Sibelius or Dorico with Note Performer?

It's free and sufficiently powerful.
With Muse Sounds... it might be most powerful, from a mockup standpoint.

If Muse Sounds cost money (it's easily worth $1000.00) then I would export midi and do laborious sequencing work with VPO, as I did before.

[d.healey]

Ah that makes sense. We care about different things. I would gladly pay $1000 for Musescore because it is free software, I wouldn't use Dorico even if it cost $0.

[Largos]

It seems they have no intention of adding vst support for Linux unfortunately. It was originally listed as being added in v4.1, then it was moved to the community tasks, and yesterday it was removed from the to do list on github.

I'm not sure that the "community" is going to help the musescore devs with anything

[Carl Irwin]

Ah that makes sense. We care about different things. I would gladly pay $1000 for Musescore because it is free software, I wouldn't use Dorico even if it cost $0.

For me, I used Finale for years. When Musescore came along and demonstrated unlimited scoring capabilities and a fairly lossless midi output (all essential attributes were in the export files), it was easy to dump Finale. The switch was all the better as Finale started to push toward a subscription model years later. I am appreciative of the open source doctrine, it just isn't my primary motivation. I need tools, I need to save my $, and I need to do it all as ethically as possible.

Do you use any proprietary VSTs or libraries?

[Carl Irwin]

It seems they have no intention of adding vst support for Linux unfortunately. It was originally listed as being added in v4.1, then it was moved to the community tasks, and yesterday it was removed from the to do list on github.

I'm not sure that the "community" is going to help the musescore devs with anything

I don't know the hive mindset if the Linux development community on this... but I have a sneaky suspicion that you are right. It seems to me that a lot of long time contributors MAY be feeling burned by the massive dump of developed capabilities from the latest release. I think that the core team should be fully responsible to put core capabilities in place... right now.

[d.healey]

Do you use any proprietary VSTs or libraries?

No, the only proprietary software on my system is the bios and firmware.

[Largos]

It seems they have no intention of adding vst support for Linux unfortunately. It was originally listed as being added in v4.1, then it was moved to the community tasks, and yesterday it was removed from the to do list on github.

I'm not sure that the "community" is going to help the musescore devs with anything

I don't know the hive mindset if the Linux development community on this... but I have a sneaky suspicion that you are right. It seems to me that a lot of long time contributors MAY be feeling burned by the massive dump of developed capabilities from the latest release. I think that the core team should be fully responsible to put core capabilities in place... right now.

It's not that, Muse group have behaved like absolute turds in the past. Example: https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/20/ ... on_threat/ Then there is this https://hackaday.com/2021/07/13/muse-gr ... -audacity/ which whilst talking about audacity, the same thing applies for musescore contributors. Not exactly making it attractive to help them.

[Rainmak3r]

Last week I tried to give MuseScore 4 a chance to test Muse Sounds, and unfortunately it was a disaster...

I have the same concerns as others about the closed source nature of Muse Hub, which is shared by others in their community too apparently, but I was curious so I decided to try and use it anyway. Not sure why it needed root access just to download stuff, but eventually it downloaded the 14GB of sounds for all orchestra sections (it always crashed any time I tried the integrated audio snippet preview, though). That said, MuseScore 4 never found the sounds when I tried to configure them: tried the Flatpak version and it couldn't detect them; tried the AppImage version (that some said would work with Sounds, unlike the Flatpak) and that didn't work either. To make things worse, it looks like M4 doesn't have any setting to disable telemetry as M3 did, but again, I wanted to give Sounds a chance so I was willing to try it anyway.

As a result, I just deleted everything, and I'm still on M3. I guess it's just not ready to work on anything they didn't specifically targeted the code for (Ubuntu probably, while I'm on Fedora), which unfortunately does indeed sound much more like what closed software usually does, than what you'd expect from open source. Not sure if M4 will eventually land in Fedora's repos (Hub won't since it is and remains closed), maybe I'll give it a try again when that happens.