What happens when the free app starts to offer better quality than the paid app? I speculate this is what MuseScore is trying - to scramble the traditional market. If it succeeds is a different question, but it’s an amazing development to watch.
If a user says, “I want decent notation with excellent and hassle-free playback” - now there is a pretty compelling offer that’s very hard to beat. All in one single program, costs nothing and sounds amazing. Dorico + NP is at least $230 more and again, not everyone loves NP when compared to Orchestral Tools or Spitfire.
The other angle is the product versions. Notation and DAW makers create stripped down versions of the flagship. It’s either this or that - there’s nothing in between. So as a customer you might get stuck. What happens if the free MuseScore becomes superior in feature set to a Dorico Elements? Even worse - what if MuseScore doesn’t even target the pro engraver market and simply goes for everyone else, in a massive user acquisition spree to build the largest non-engraver user base and lock them into their ecosystem?
The huge advantage Steinberg has is in the fact that a lot of people invested literally thousands of dollars into software. It will be very painful to throw all that away. The opportunity MuseScore is exploiting is that there is very little seamless interoperability between sample libraries, VEPros, DAWs and Doricos of the world - it’s painful and frustrating to get them to work together. “Works with Dorico” sounds like a super corny Windows slogan from the 90s but imagine all these libraries got updates that enabled this kind of instant playback in Dorico. That’s why I can’t understand how the inventor of VST that made interoperability possible in the first place seems to be sitting on the sidelines.
It’s certainly true that MuseScore 4 isn’t a replacement for what Dorico can do (and what I need in a notation program), but NP4 will need to be a spectacular improvement compared to NP3. What Muse has included with MuseScore-for FREE!- is a remarkably good library. Its strings, for example, blow NP3’s out of the water, IMO. The Muse sounds are also sound a little better, I think, than the Garritan libraries I paid a lot of money for during my Finale years. I’d pay for a VST version of MUSE to use in Dorico instead of NP3.
It won’t be the sounds that determines which software will be dominant in the end.
There’s nothing good about Dorico not being able to do this or that. A lot of things crop up year after year (some of them quite basic) and it would obviously be better if they were eventually dealt with. You have your parochial interests as much as anyone else. To be really dominant, Dorico needs to be able to do as much as possible better than any other software.
Quite so, and never denied. The difference is while I voice my requests, I don’t chastise the team when they don’t implement them on my schedule.
Obviously. But as has been mentioned many times, just because something appears “quite basic” on user side doesn’t mean it is so as far as development back end. This is very evidently why these ‘simple things’ have not yet been tackled. It took until version 4 for Musescore to even draw 8th notes evenly in a measure.
Quite so. Dorico is awesome notation-wise; but for those of us who also write for publication, the more ‘realistic’ playback is for a potential buyer, te better🙂
If you think the team have made an error of judgement, it would seem reasonable to say so. Perhaps you might have some insight that could help. Why you would mock someone who might have an urgent need for a particular feature, I don’t know.
Is this evident? Daniel’s comments often indicate that decisions are a result of priorities rather than technical difficulty. Dorico 4 had a particular emphasis; I’m hoping that Dorico 5 will have a different one. I do worry though about the comment by one of the developers (several years ago) about how a lot of things had turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. When something takes years to deal with, I occasionally find myself fearing that something’s amiss in the architecture.
There are plenty of things that Dorico can’t do yet though they’re acknowledged as deficiencies and often asked about. There were things that Finale could do thirty years ago that Dorico can’t do now. What’s the point in pretending Dorico can’t be improved?
You seem to imply that I’ve stated that Dorico does not need improving. I have never given or implied this. We’ve even acknowledged in this very thread that I’ve made a number of requests for improvement myself. My point was merely to show, via hyperbolic emphasis, that if we are going to shred on Dorico for lacking things that you deem to be simple or basic, we might as well toss a few other names into the ring while we are at it. Since this thread regards Musescore 4, I made an observation about something that was pretty important that took years to be implemented. There’s no way you can make the logical jump from that hyperbole to me somehow implying that Dorico is perfect or beyond reproach.
As Jordan Peterson quips, everything, even where you focus your eyes at any given moment, is the result of a constant prioritization. It is certainly true that the dev team has their priorities (which often do, and often do not align with popular consensus), but there’s also a balance that they strive to find (as I understand it) and part of the act of prioritizing is also considering development cost, hence my comments regarding things that are seemingly ‘simple’ but still lacking in the program. While simple, they still have a sufficiently high development cost as to warrant being shoved down the queue.
They do certainly prioritize banner features that have high development cost over simpler features that might be quick [relatively speaking] to code. But from that, it does not follow that they are willfully ignoring essentials in the pursuit of folly.
You previously said that ‘just because something appears “quite basic” on user side doesn’t mean it is so as far as development back end. This is very evidently why these ‘simple things’ have not yet been tackled’.
I suggested that this was not evident and you now seem to be agreeing with me.
Anyway, to return to the main point, I’m saying that I don’t believe that things like sounds matter very much in the end and that I hope there’ll be a renewed focus on notation at some point. There are the frequent ‘is this still not possible’ posts but I get the impression that people don’t even bother to mention some of the problems any more.
I’ve never once heard anyone claim or pretend Dorico can’t be improved. On the contrary, there’s no shortage of opinions of what should be improved (and how, and how soon), including my own.
What’s been said repeatedly is that the development team is very small, and they have to prioritize what they do and when they do it. The only way to change this is get more revenue coming in so the team has more resources to devote to more things.
For that reason alone, allocating resources on a feature Finale had 30 years ago makes no sense if it is trivial and doesn’t substantially add to the tool set. On the other hand, introducing features that address serious deficiencies, create new functionality and therefore bring in lots of paying new users is paramount. Every highly successful software in history always focused on highest-impact standout features first, the relatively minor enhancements later.
That’s why I find the MuseScore development worrying. Even though it took them 2 years to get to v. 4 and they have no MIDI editing at all yet, their offer looks extremely compelling. They are directly addressing a massive and long-standing pain point - the ease and quality of playback. I think that will be extremely attractive to a lot of people who perhaps might have been paying Doricians.
Well, knowing Martin Kaery… I wouldn’t underestimate MuseScore anymore. Version 4.0 is the first full release led by him and already looks like totally different and far more advanced product than any previous MuseScore release. We should keep in mind the collaboration on the Leland Font between Martin and the engraver Simon Smith, who worked at Boosey & Hawkes publishing house.
With Martin as a head of the MuseScore team, I expect this application to become a real competitor to Dorico, Sibelius and Finale.
I have no doubts that he is going to collaborate with other professional engravers in order to improve this side of MuseScore.
Actually we should start thinking about MuseScore 4 and later, as completely different product than what was known as MuseScore until this release. After all almost everything was completely re-designed. From now on it will only become more and more powerful and improved…
On a slight tangent here, MuseScore has really ambushed the others out of left field with this major release. One reason people like to buy commercial products as opposed to free software is the assurance of support. I’m going to hammer here the fact that there is effectively no company support for Dorico for me, in Australia, as I am not allowed to contact Germany for support, and get flicked off to Australia which is Yamaha, who get my award for the worst, most ignorant customer support I have ever encountered in 40 years. They do not respond for months, and they know nothing whatsoever about Dorico, to add insult to injury. There is effectively no support. Mr Spreadbury, if you read this, could you have a word to management about this ongoing appalling state of affairs? I know I am not the only one in Australia with the same issue. This is not supposed to be a rant, just a statement of an unfortunate fact. I need to keep bringing it up in the hope that one day somebody will take note and address the matter, annoying though it may be. Ironically, I can’t complain about this to local Australian support because they don’t respond. Sigh.
Therefore I am grateful to have this forum full of kind and generous help. But let’s not forget that open source and freeware applications also have similar forums. Suddenly we have a really viable competitor. Not everybody is a professional engraver or film scorer, and MuseScore looks set to capture a large set of users who don’t need every last pro feature Dorico has, whereas they may have bought Dorico, or Elements previously. I hope this may be the stimulus for Dorico to engage more resources to come to an even higher level than now.
Don’t get me wrong. I feel Dorico is a staggering achievement and when I use it everyday I am constantly astonished at how good it is at what it does. But suddenly the playing field has opened up. Actually, it can only be good for everybody.
Just as a footnote, having dedicated a decade to Lilypond and having developed lots of Scheme code libraries for it, MuseScore was always the lesser sister and I couldn’t take it seriously. Now however I see no further point in pursuing Lilypond activities, unless for setting mediaeval music or specialist areas like that. Quite a turnaround has occurred.
To me using Musescore 4.0 is a total no-brainer. A long time ago I considered Dorico (since I don’t like the scoring tool in Cubase) But the pricetag kept me from just doing it. More or less at the same time I heard about the ambitions set for the new 4.0 of Musescore, and decided to just wait for it. Today I am glad I did. It will totally turn around my workflow. What is THE most valauble improvement is the VST support, and the ease of use of it. So even if a Musesound is less than perfect I can just switch to my other plugin/s and use them instead. However, many Musesounds are great - out of the box. You just can’t fiddle around with their settings as you can in most VST’s.
(ADSR and so on…) I think that, eventually, I will be able to also reduce my use of Cubase to only direct recordings and mastering, as I will be able to finish most of the scoring in Musescore. We are not quite there yet, but I think it’s only a matter of time…
MuseScore 4 does not support Adobe fonts. A showstopper for me, and I suppose many others. What a pity. No doubt due to limitations with the Qt framework. Dorico uses Qt also but at least you can use Adobe fonts even if you can’t access all the open type features.
From now on it will only become more and more powerful and improved…