This video is only a few years old but should already be considered a classic. Not long after, the video's creator was hired to lead design of MuseScore (another sheet music desktop app).<p>I find the world of music notation software to be fascinating in its diversity of design philosophies. Something about music notation — its complexity, plus its worldwide ubiquity, plus the business reality that there's (relatively) not a ton of money to be made in its software industry — creates a situation where many interesting ideas bloom and there is not one clear monopoly.<p>Yes, Sibelius and Finale are the longtime popular applications, but Dorico recently came on the scene with a genuinely new philosophy, and there are lots of less popular apps, mostly one-person-show kinds of things, with different approaches to how editing music should work.<p>My own attempt is with Soundslice (<a href="https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/" rel="nofollow">https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/</a>), which has an entirely web-based sheet-music editor and lots of tools for music learning/practice.
This guy also made a similarly acerbic video about MuseScore, a good open source scorewriter [1]. They actually took his criticisms and started making changes. The two ended up working together and I think he is now the design lead for MuseScore.<p>1: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A</a>
Well, the founders of Sibelius created another music notation software called Dorico[1].<p>Is Dorico's UI more consistent? Does it address many of the issues of this video's criticism?<p>Or put another way, does being a green-field software project allow the freedom to create a sane UI? Or did it have to deliberately copy may of Sibelius' faults so migrating users can quickly get up to speed with Dorico? (Analogous to MS Excel copying Lotus 123 buggy leap year of 1900 to be more compatible.)<p>EDIT -- just noticed same uploader also made a 1 hour video about Dorico[2] but not sure if answers my questions.<p>[1] <a href="https://new.steinberg.net/dorico/" rel="nofollow">https://new.steinberg.net/dorico/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8</a>
Have a look at what is actually needed for someone doing arbitrary copy/engraving jobs-- e.g., making money on the side by using software to engrave film scores, modern classical, musicals, etc.<p>IIRC the most valuable feature is the ability for the engraver to quickly and deterministically escape the set of behaviors that the software provides to ease the act of engraving <i>exactly</i> what they want to see.<p>Score and Finale have been the gold standards because there is a way to escape the default behavior, to draw whatever they want on the score. In Finale's case, these ways are all explicitly documented so that even a relatively new user can (slowly) find each escape valve. Finale even has a shitty, black-and-white Microsoft paint for the user to paint whatever articulation, shape, or even notehead they need to accommodate whatever notational style or concept is needed.<p>That's all to say-- the power user is going to live in the escape valves for a substantial amount of time. (How else could you explain people <i>still</i> using Score when Finale had been around for decades?)<p>Historically, competitors to Finale/Score simply did not have the adequate number of escape valves. In those cases good interface design was irrelevant because professional engravers couldn't get the control they needed to engrave scores, which meant they couldn't use those programs to make money. Either that, or the software would do a <i>really</i> good job at, say, jazz engraving, and then <i>imply</i> that it was good at all style of notation when it wasn't.<p>Somebody at Musescore should do a kickstarter to cross-reference the current Finale documentation against the escape-valves present in Musescore. In the domain of engraving, is Musescore feature complete with all of Finale's escape valves? If so, it's worth advertising that because it's a really important achievement.<p>(Note: I'm reticent to mention specific engraving problems for fear that a neophyte will take my 10 seconds of examples as a complete set and declare Musescore feature complete. But if someone wants examples and promises not to do that, I'll give them.)<p>Edit: clarification
I've stubbornly stayed on Sibelius 6 for years, but it no longer works on OS X Catalina, so I was pondering biting the bullet and upgrading to 8. But after seeing this...<p>Does anyone have any recommendations for a _real_ alternative they've used?* I took a look at MuseScore a couple of years ago and the impression I got was that it was fine for casual usage and for producing fairly simple scores, but lacked a lot of features. (I found that to be the case LillyPond as well.) Dorico looks more promising, but I'm curious what people who've used it heavily think.<p>I didn't even know that Finale was still around, but that was the first notation software I learned. Ironic that the reason Sibelius was able to trounce Finale in the marketplace so many years ago was mainly because the UI was so much easier to use and more intuitive. And now it's succumbed to the same problems.<p>*Features I'd like to see: parts generation, graphical score options, midi-based entry, and something that offers good default engraving behavior out-of-the-box but also lets you tweak everything to your liking. I typically sketch things out on on paper first, so I care less about "composition features" and more about being able to produce scores that are correct and that allow me to notate everything I would want.
It's ironic that several of the criticisms here are for huge lists of 'engraving' options in hidden menus in Sibelius. Engraving is the equivalent of typesetting (but music obviously doesn't have moveable type). I used a late 90's version of Finale for a long time which I think was originally written for engraving rather than composition. I had to learn to step over the engraving stuff in Finale to get to many of the composition features.
This is an amazingly well done video. I love not only the on-point criticism of the UI but the demonstrations of the suggested improvements really drive the points home.
I've been working on an IDE for music composition and I like to think that I nailed the UI. Launching soon <a href="http://ngrid.io" rel="nofollow">http://ngrid.io</a>.