Anybody ever get the urge to re-typeset a personalized version of what they’re learning (using a music notation program or 'score writer')? I enjoy using software anyway, but making your own custom version has some extra advantages:

• You can neatly incorporate your own fingering choices.
• The engraving can be as spacious or compact as you want it to be, because you control all the formatting parameters like line breaks, measure ‘stretch’ and the spacing between staves and systems.
• If you want fewer page turns, then condense the music with that in mind. But put them where you want them, in any case!
• If you’d like your music in a ‘large print’ format, then just increase the scaling!
• Or maybe you’d just like to get your head inside the music in a different sort of way.

I never explored doing any of this when the only alternatives were costly commercial programs like Finale and Sibelius. (I looked at Lilypond, but it looked the learning curve was impossibly steep unless you have enormous dedication to using a program that doesn’t even have a WYSIWYG interface anyhow.)

MuseScore -- www.musescore.org -- has changed all that for me. It’s free and open source software, its development is very much ongoing, and there’s an active member community of users who participate in a discussion forum on-site.

Sorry if this reads like an advertisement, but my entire life I’ve loved the aesthetics of music notation -- and this freely-distributed product is astounding to me. It’s intuitive, it can accept MIDI input from your digital keyboard, and I’m finding it useful even to re-create isolated passages or episodes in a way that’s clearer to me graphically. (Think of the Development section of the first movement of Chopin’s Sonata Op. 58, for example, with all that polyphony, tied notes and voices that shift between the hands.)

Anyway, here’s the first page of my current project, the Trois Nouvelles Etude in D-flat:


'My' version stretches the 73 bars of music to a luxurious and eye-friendly three pages, unlike those cramped-up two-page versions in practically every printed edition of this piece. (Pedal marks are missing because I haven’t added them yet -- they're not relevant at my stage of studying the piece.)

So any fans here? Or potential converts to trying this approach?

That's very interesting. I'll have to explore it and learn more about it. Thanks for sharing.

Regards,

I think that this is too much. I mean you're a performer and you will need to become a copyist in order to make a score like this? Of course I understand the value of personalized scores, but it really seems like a stretch really... Sorry...

If you have a poor memory and you play primarily at sight (as I do) I can see the benefit of enlarging the score, although that could lead to more page turns (and more inconvenient page turns unless you're very diligent).

I do it occasionally, but more to practice using Sibelius than to help me with my piano studies.

Prefer reading my pencil markings.......


I use Sibelius by the way.

ccp :

How long did it take you to create your copy of the Chopin Etude? The one time, several months ago - and before I knew there was a tutorial explaining the basics of this software - it took me ages by trial and error to write a simple one-line, 16-bar score.

Obviously, watching and understanding the tutorial will be of great help, although it may not answer all questions.

Regards,

musescore is awesome. i've been using it for a while--for composing. you can also upload your compositions onto musescore.net, which is like youtube for your own compositions if you will.

one thing you could do, instead of copying note-by-note, if to find a midi file and use musescore to convert in back into score. do note that this process is NOT at all as automatic as it sounds--frequently the generated score is, while note correct, completely unreadable. but it actually does work once in a while.

I think it's an awesome idea. Practical and educational!

Bruce, I have to admit that it took MANY hours for me -- 20, maybe?. It might take others more time, or less time, depending on a number of variables (even if we were ‘typesetting’ the same piece!). And what’s time-flying fun for some of us would be very tedious torture for others. Here are some maybe-relevant points:

I’ve already used MuseScore for quite a while. I found it really easy to learn, but in the working world I was a ‘power user’ of MS Office -- and many concepts are carried over from word processing to music processing. Inputting the notes is fairly fast and easy, whether directly from the computer’s keyboard (and, in that case, whether by mouse-clicking or by using keyboard itself) or from a MIDI keyboard/digital piano.

Using a MIDI keyboard for inputting notes isn’t the blessing it might seem to be -- that is, it’s not significantly faster, in general -- primarily because it doesn’t recognize notes’ durations. (The input is said to be ‘step-wise’, I think, rather than ‘real-time’.) As a practical matter, then, pieces/passages/episodes where the note values remain more-or-less constant -- think ‘perpetuum mobile’ type figuration -- do have an advantage being input via MIDI.

But otherwise, when you have to stop all the time to change the duration of the upcoming note(s) on your computer keyboard, it’s not so advantageous even if they are physically close (and they’ll need to be because of limited cable lengths connecting them). (My most recent two projects were Chopin’s Preludes Nos. 5 and 16, though -- so my creaky old digital piano definitely sped up the input with those! Even Chopin’s Fugue was pretty simple to do that way.)

What takes a lot of time, though, is the tweaking involved -- getting it all to look pretty. Sometimes notes are ‘spelled’ incorrect enharmonically; some kinds of formatting aren’t automatically handled well (or at all) by the software, either. For example, dense chords with many accidentals might need to have the positions of the accidentals tweaked -- and this is especially the case with chord clusters with notes contained more than voice. (Actually polyphony has its own share of special issues, because all the notes and rests of each voice have to be input independently and the stems’ directions will frequently have to be reversed manually.)

Lingyis, I’ve never tried that route of importing a MIDI file into MuseScore -- nor have I used the XML format that’s talked about a lot as apparently offering a means of cross-program file transferability -- but I can guess (as you’ve suggested) that it would involve significant clean-up. But even that would have to be relatively manageable compared to so-called ‘optical music recognition’ programs (OMR).

With OMR, the concept is analogous to putting a sheet of text onto a scanner and having it transformed into editable text via ‘optical character recognition’ (OCR). But while OCR scanning technology has been existent and functional in offices for at least 30 years -- with hardware and software evolving a great deal over that long period -- the whole OMR is very much in its infancy. I only know of one freeware OMR program -- Audiveris -- and it created such a mess that it had no practical value at all.

I know that this whole subject isn’t for everyone. I even thought some people would think it so off-base that I was just having some fun and joking around. Well, it’s fun all right! I’m really having a blast with this, and I’m even ‘beta-testing’ the next major release of MuseScore. The current ‘official’ release is robust and capable, but the next major release will be even more feature-packed (and, I’m finding, already sufficient stable for doing ‘real’ work).

Question:

As MuseScore is free and open source, and Sibelius and Finale are not, are there any clear disadvantages to using MuseScore? Is it harder to use? Are there some really great features in the commercial products that MuseScore lacks? Or is it just a question of customer support?

Thanks-

-Jason

In Sibelius the numpad controls note durations and articulations. With a midi controller in one hand and the numpad in the other I can enter stuff at lightning fast speed.

You gotz teh SKILLZ!!

According to the tutorial Musescore also allows the user to use the number pad for the note values and the alphabetical keyboard (A through G) for pitch placement.

Regards,

I haven't used musescore as I'm a Finale user, but I can tell you my experience with open office vs MS office!

Open office is open source and free! It works almost like a charm, has dictionary and everything else word had... a few years ago.

However when I tried my hands on MS office 2010, I was stunned at the developments done there. It appears that open office has remained at WIN XP level of 'quality'...

Other than that I did my full thesis (PhD thesis) with open office and run onto no trouble, no bugs, no glitches, nothing I wanted done and wasn't done.

Not sure if musescore is at the same level as open office, but I'm a huge supporter of open source software!

Office 2011 for Mac is even more gorgeous if you can imagine that, lol. I personally like programs in which I am absorbed mentally for long periods of time to not just be functional and well written, but also aesthetically pleasing and attractive environments in which to work. I used open office for a while, but I just couldnt get over how ugly it is.

Musescore handles traditional piano music very well. Where Sibelius and Finale beat Musescore is their layout options, playback functions, and contemporary or non-standard notational formats.

Also, on a microscopic level, there are little problems in the way the fonts look. If you zoom in on a musescore document, you can see how the stems don't perfectly run into the noteheads correctly, slurs and dots aren't consistently placed, note spacing is a little crowded, the fonts it uses aren't as clean as Opus or Petrucci, nor are there as many font choices. Compare the Musescore sample document (which I assume represents some of the best the application can produce) with a similar score done in Finale or Sibelius. None of this matters on the hobbyist level, but for print publication, the overall quality from a professional software package is noticeably better.

Lilypond should also be mentioned. While not a WYSIWYG editor, the output is stunning and very flexible:

http://lilypond.org/examples.html

Thanks for the clear explanation of MuseScore vs. Sibelius/Finale, Kreisler.

And: thanks for the introduction to Lilypond. That might actually be perfect for me. At first glance, it seems to be not such a huge leap from LaTex.

-J

+1



According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_LilyPond, it apparently was forked from MusiXTeX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusiXTeX), which was TeX based.

wow, i didn't even know there's something like MusiXTeX. will read up on it one of these days.

and want to echo on the Open Office vs MS Office: I think in high school I might have used either Finale or Sibelius a little bit, but I imagine both are much, much, much more polished than musescore.

I don't know Sibelius, but here are some more features in Finale I think are worth mentioning, in addition to what Kreisler described. There is yet another MIDI keyboard input method in Finale that actually will recognize note values so that you don't have to manually enter them; it requires fairly precise "playing", though. Finale also includes a "lite" version of SmartScore, a music scanning program. I have the standalone full version of SmartScore and it can work surprisingly well, depending on a number of factors; I haven't tried the Finale version. Kreisler brought up playback functions - regarding that, Finale includes a fairly high-quality sample library and player, so that instruments sound much more realistic than the synth included with MuseScore.