Music Software & Interface Design: MuseScore

This is a UX & UI design review of the music notation software: MuseScore, which has become increasingly popular over the last few years. In this video I look at three things: the visual appeal of its UI design, the usability of its navigation and how it compares to Avid’s Sibelius when it comes to notation finesse. Since the company was bought by Ultimate Guitar in 2018, it’s beginning to look like a serious competitor, especially since it’s open source and free to use. Download it now and see for yourself!

This review focuses solely on the recently released MuseScore 3, rather than MuseScore 2, which is no longer being actively developed.

This is the second part of my notation software comparison series. The next application in line for review will be either Notion, Dorico or Finale. I’ll let circumstance dictate which! Sibelius get a few mentions in this video. I couldn't not talk about them!

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Please support me on Patreon. It's the only way I can finance making these videos with any degree of stability.

Some notes on this video:

Mania (Greek goddess of insanity) and Oizys (Greek goddess of depression and anxiety) are depicted here as creepy looking statues. Since neither of these gods are particularly well known, it was extremely difficult to find sculptures of either of them, so I used images of unusual, weather beaten statues found in Vienna. I’m pretty sure the one on the right is a depiction of Mary. The other… I’m not certain.

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Attributions:

The horror music used during ‘those’ Shostakovich scenes were created by GowlerMusic:

Thanks to Daniel Ray at MuseScore for all his tireless help answering questions never once asking me to 'be nice'!

Thanks to Jonathan Lee (Pentameron) for providing much better subtitles than mine. Really appreciate the work and I've learned a lot about how to do it properly. (You'd think it's easy)
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LINKS

Download MuseScore 3

Design and Open Source

Mental models:

[konkey-dong]

this video ended up being the world's ballsiest job application lmao

[Lkease]

After this video, Musescore hired Tantacrul as Head Designer

No joke.

[AniMerrill]

I'm gonna say some mean things >:(

*proceeds to give really constructive criticism which will probably help an open source project more than the professional software*

[somebody]

Just noticed – Why doesn't MuseScore have a “Quit Sibelius” button if they seem to be everywhere?

[RocketScientistNick]

I'm really enjoying the "it's okay to be wrong" recurring gag.

[guest]

Tantacrul: I think musescore could now do with some dedicated full-time designers to fix these problems
Also Tantacrul: *gets hired to be said designer*

[TamDNB]

Revisiting this after MuseScore 4 has been released is fascinating.

[allenlark]

The knowledge eye is just clippy and you know it.

[QuotePilgrim]

Of the notation programs you plan on reviewing, you need to review Finale last, so that you can call it the season finale.

...

I'll show myself out.

[rabbitos]

I've never heard of MuseScore. I don't compose music. I can't even _read_ sheet music. Yet I just watched a half hour video on composing software. And I enjoyed it thoroughly.

[f.i.r.e.]

So, this video came out in 2019, by which point I can remember being frustrated with a lot of this stuff.
Now that Tantacrul's part of Musescore's design process, it's fascinating seeing how many of these problems have been fixed in the last year. Especially the little things talked about in Part 3.
Now, as of May 2020:

Whenever I delete an element spanning multiple notes, it automatically highlights the starting note so I can start there again.
I no longer need to double-click on stuff to edit it.
Copying and pasting now replaces old phrasing and dynamics with the copied/pasted dynamics and phrasing, which has sped up the score creation process considerably.
I can change the spacing of staves and measures just by clicking and dragging. (I do still enter values into the sidebar often, since it helps with exact measurements, but clicking and dragging gets me in the ballpark a lot faster.)
I can change the duration of multiple notes or rests at once.
That ugly, clinical gray background is now a more soothing dark blue.

I do mostly piano covers of songs I like, and one of those, which used to take me between five and seven hours, now takes an average of three. Two or less if I'm covering a song I really, really like.

Hats off to you, Tantacrul, and the rest of the MuseScore team. Thank you.

[willowsparks]

I've just checked my musescore logo and it has your updated logo from the right...
You Win

[danielray]

New All certainly is the Quit Sibelius of MuseScore.

[sosasees]

Keep in mind that this video is now slightly outdated.
After Tantacrul made this video, the MuseScore community went out of its way to fix these issues with Tantacrul's advice, and now he's the lead designer for MuseScore.

[seanmurphy]

Going from the logo, I think it's supposed to be pronounced

[DBruce]

I love your sarcastic camera zooms and pans! Another epic video, congrats!

[KelnelK]

Tantacrul: look at this
Me, a backend developer: this looks pretty good
Tantacrul: makes a 30 minute video about why it's ugly

[SebastianLis]

*all video* - trashing musescore for its design
*ending* - "I really liked musescore"
Well.. okay

[IOxyrinchus]

This is so relatable. At school in music class while we didn’t use muse score, we had to use Sibelius and it was hilarious. Not only did it take ages to do the most basic things because we didn’t know our way around the bloody thing and had to learn to use it within an unrealistic timeframe, but we got to witness the pure anger and wrath of our music teacher towards the software as she wrestled it into working properly... when it wasn’t crashing.

[DPadGamer]

This whole application seems like a real Muh Moment.