I’m very intrigued by Musescore now that they plan to merge purchases from Staffpad. I gave up on Staffpad after their updates started to ruin the playback of my old scores… what a waste of time. It seems like development is more focused on MuseScore and is heavily influenced by user feedback, which I appreciate.
Regarding the audio engine, does it allow you to:
Use Kontakt and other third-party plugins?
Fully edit MIDI data, including continuous controllers, keyswitches, and automation?
Loop playback?
Import an audio track for hybrid scores or dialogue?
Import a video track?
I’ll wait until I can use my Staffpad purchases in Musescore, but I’m interested in hearing about your experience creating mockups with it. It seems like it might already be doing what Dorico does, but better? I’ve listened to some tracks on Youtube that were very impressive, though I’m not sure if they were all created with stock Muse sounds.
I’m honestly starting to prefer noteperformer—still on the trial version right now. Somehow it works on MacOS Catalina.
I have trouble with all these things with muse sounds. It’s funny that in the hub, it says that it takes no effort to work with—obviously incorrect!
All the problems mentioned above. I’m constantly changing dynamics, the violins and trumpets are too slidy and never come in on time, and the brass goes immediately from a whimper to a loud sound.
Incredible, sure, but free, and still in its beta. Hasn’t even reached 1.0 yet.
The guitars, however, are perfection. Would love to use them with Dorico. If only I could figure .out how the sound font on GitHub works.
The hub.
Edit: ah, a typo. I meant in the hub.
100% my experience too!!! Slidly uncontrollable portamento which makes everything sound late and sloppy, and jarring extreme dynamic changes even when using gradual hairpins. The last project I did in there I ultimately had to add single dynamics and export as stems for every instrument: I did one pass all p, another pass all mf and another all f, just to offer me three dynamic flavors – took those into Cubase and did tons of editing, crossfading, and automation to make it sound natural. The end result worked out nicely but it took hours and made me realize how much of a blessing and time-saver NP really is, even if it doesn’t have all the “impressive” sounds and techniques of MuseSounds, it at least works giving me playback of what I expect to hear, without me wanting to throw my computer out the window lol.
Not to mention I can work vastly faster and more efficiently in Dorico!
Can’t you edit the CC data in Musescore, or are you limited to adjusting the dynamic markings?
Yep, the regular NotePerformer, without NPPE, still stands head and shoulders above the competition for a neutral, balanced representation of your score. It often translates well to real orchestras. But as a finished product, it sounds quite synthetic to my ears. Great for demoing cues though!
Actually don’t recall having this problem. This could be because you aren’t connecting up the hairpins to the dynamics right. This is hard in MuseScore without a caret or popover to help. I’ve downloaded many mscz scores where the dynamics are meant to look good and yet don’t hook up to the notes and then when I import mxl into Dorico it loses the written gradual dynamics and turns them into text which produced the same effect.
Wow, that must have taken a long time, but it sounds like it was worth it. I’ve noticed NP only uses that loud brass sound Muse Sounds has when crescendoing on a note, often a final swell.
It’s hard to say whether I prefer NP solo strings or Muse Sounds solo strings—they both have their strong points. Solo Violin 2 would make a good section player, while Solo Violin 1 has that slidy solo quality you either love or hate.
And yes, Dorico is so much faster to use , primarily because of the caret and grid system instead of inputting all the rests. As a composer, speed is key.
It wasn’t always hairpins. Sometimes it would be a jarring and substantial difference from immediately adjacent dynamics, such as p to mp but sounding more like pp to f in actuality. It sounds like what you said above is that you have struggled with dynamics in MuseScore, so I was sharing that I have run into them as well, perhaps different from yours, the uneven and unpredictable dynamics are well documented online as a common complaint by many users.
To be clear I use NPPEs 98% of the time for strings as they are significantly better, though I usually prefer to write with just stock NP so I can focus on the writing first (especially since I like playing in live with my keyboard). But NPPEs are still a lot more consistent and predictable. With the slidy quality - there’s nothing wrong with portamento when you are in control over it. However the fact I’ve noticed it will add portamento with adjacent notes (where a player wouldn’t shift, or a player would simply cross strings), the portamento is not only distracting but also completely unrealistic. I would hope that would offer a better way to control this in the future. I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure inside of MS you cannot automate CC to this aim, but I don’t know it that well.
In short, though, my bigger point isn’t that NP or NPPE always sounds better, but mostly that it sounds more consistent and dependable which for me is more important, and I would rather have that any day than have to take everything into cubase and finesse automation for hours on end. For the record of that previous composition I did that to, I wouldn’t say the final outcome was actually worth the extra labor, but like a dog with a bone once I start down a certain path I won’t let go until I finish haha. The experience left me feeling, “not worth it, never again!”
Yes, with NPPE it’s possible to achieve a very good result with virtually no mucking about. I too have used the Cubase route, adjusting velocities, note lengths, and multiple automation lines. It’s truly painful and life is too short! Like you, I never want to do that again.
There are a couple of other benefits to using NPPE for me, vs. Using a DAW.
The first is having confidence that the render reflects the music reasonably well. In Cubase, with so much manual adjustment, I could never be sure that a real performance would even remotely resemble the rendered version.
I mostly use Spitfire libraries, but I also took out a cut-price year’s subscription to EW and for cross-checking I run my projects through their orchestral libraries. It’s generally true that if it sounds good with BBCSO it sounds good with HOOPUS.
The second is the speed of making changes. Because everything is driven from the score, I can try out the effect of different dynamics or phrasing instantaneously.
The third is future improvements. Every release of NP, including small ones, has brought significant improvements in playback with NPPE and I’m sure that will continue. Hopefully, improvements will come to the rendering of Hollywood Choirs! That’s still a weakness, and there are others too.
Also, Musescore allows you to use other vst libraries that you own instead of its own for playback. May not solve the articulation/playback weaknesses of Musescore, but it’s a surprising ability in a free program. Nothing I’ve ever used (Finale & Notion [which i still have a soft spot for])beats Dorico with NP/NPPE using my Spitfire BBC SO and Synchron Prime libraries, though. The day I discovered Dorico was a happy paradigm shift for me🙂
For contrast, across 3 years and as many versions, when Dorico has occasionally crashed on me, I have never lost more than the auto-save interval’s worth of work – in my case 5 minutes.
I can count on one hand the number of times Dorico has crashed on me in the last year, and I use it every day. It is exceedingly rare for me, (as is meet and just) and for that I’m grateful.
Same for me with Dorico. And I push it very hard every day with complex hybrid setups involving NP + Various VSTs (Kontakt, VSL, VEPro). At the very worst once a project gets complex it just lags a little bit but rarely ever has it fully crashed on me!