What do you mean by this? I have Adobe fonts that work fine in MuseScore. Or do you mean it doesn’t support fonts enabled through Adobe’s font subscription program? Or something else?
As for support: you have direct access to Daniel S, Ulf, and others on this very forum. What more support do you need?
What do you mean by ‘Adobe fonts’? PostScript Type 1?
Adobe themselves are about to stop supporting them (somewhat regrettably as a large number of typefaces will be lost):
PostScript Type 1 fonts end of support
The balance in Muse Sounds is REALLY wonky.
I brought my engraving of Jerry Goldsmith’s “The Enterprise” from Star Trek: The Motion Picture over from Dorico/Noteperformer to see how the MuseSounds rendition is, and well:
Dorico/Noteperformer version: Dropbox - Dorico Star Trek The Motion Picture - The Enterprise - Dorico 4.1 - The Enterprise.mp3 - Simplify your life
MuseSounds version: Dropbox - MuseScore The Enterprise.mp3 - Simplify your life
I mean the Adobe subscriptions fonts. the Adobe Fonts service part of Creative Cloud.
I am not referring to Postscript Type 1.
Anyway, I suppose this is not a MuseScore support forum, so we can drop it. There are a large number of posts there regarding this in MuseScore 3, all unresolved. Maybe not an issue for some people, but certainly quite a few.
Thanks for posting the example. Wow.! Sounds good.!
Now this is all getting very interesting.! It has to be said, they’ve done an amazing job at this ‘first release’ in what’s practically a new program; just downloaded and installed (will get all the MuseSounds next).
My expectations were reset a little, after a friend pointed me (during their Alpha/Beta phase) to some areas ‘missing’ from v3 MuseScore 3 features not implemented in MuseScore 4 | MuseScore. Unsure how much there is still valid.
Muse Sounds support in Dorico (Elements for me) is a whole different topic - I read elsewhere the engine/sounds/playback in MS 4 is not based on any VST or MIDI technology, so could be waiting a while to see that appear.
Still, an interesting 2023 ahead.
I’d be careful. I’ve just imported a section from a large orchestral work (Tchaikovsky / Romeo and Juliet) in Musescore 4 and there are enough issues there for me not to consider that approach as viable at the moment. JMO but Musesounds seems to be much closer to non plug and play libraries (East West, Spitfire etc.) than it ever is to NP.
The individual sounds are, for the most part, good - I’d describe them as clearer and warmer than NP. However, there are enough issues with section size, balance (the balance was terrible, to be honest), dynamics and performance for me to realise I’d be spending quite a bit of time sorting it all out. There were also problems with the import itself, some tempo and articulations were missing.
All that said, I don’t want to sound too down on Musescore 4. All this and it’s free? Come on. A lot of people are going to be more than happy. It’s not got the depth of Dorico -certainly not in terms of features but also in terms of usability - but it’s got 95%+ of what a lot of people would be using most of the time and, personally, I love its ambition. They fully deserve the plaudits they’re getting for this release.
Having just upgraded from Elements to Pro (cyber weeks) I am hoping that I won’t be too impressed by Muse 4…
Well we’re off to a good start - cannot load MuseHub on Catalina, needs OS 11.5 or higher. So Catalina on both my MacBook and Mac Pro are out for the Muse Sounds.
As to running Musescore 4 generally; another non-promising start. If you have any plugins that need iLok, but your iLok is not plugged in, then Musescore quits when you “quit” the pop-up plugin authorisation. Cannot run on my MacBook without taking the iLok from my studio.
That said, from what I can see and others comments it really is an outstanding achievement and will be very welcome for thousands of users.
Bravo Musescore and thank you for upping the ante for all.
Didn’t behave that way for me. Opened after 3 “quit” clicks…
mine is having a phasing issue with the strings … not using external soundcard tho, let me try on a soundcard. I really like the sound … head to head with NP3 I guess
The video is now out: https://youtu.be/Qct6LKbneKQ
I don’t really think they are comparable products. I agree Muse 4 is impressive, but it is of the 1980/1990s model of very “linear” orientation, for lack of a better term. Dorico is a completely different approach with the presentation of the score dictated by a very elaborate set of rules, and manual placement being the exception rather than the ordinary.
Recent releases of Finale and others nibble at improving some of the placement decisions, but they still are from the 80/90s way of thinking about the problem and I don’t expect they will ever evolve to where Dorico already is.
That’s not necessarily a criticism. Many people have a very difficult time thinking in terms of broad rules. Some folks are much happier manually controlling the placement of every single element. And for that body of users, it is really hard to beat Musescore, even with the subscription price.
In particular, I believe the educational world was once a fortress of Finale’s. I don’t have any particular knowledge of the current state of play, but I would imagine MuscScore has become almost ubiquitous in the academic environment because of the price.
Of course, this is all a challenge to Steinberg. The Muse4 playback is impressive, but that isn’t the only battleground. Dorico’s recent addition of some basic harmonization functions is an important path to the future of notation, as is the integration with DAWs and the whole world of producers who work primarily in a DAW.
It is a very interesting question. My professional life was in the tech business, completely unrelated to music. For a number of years, I led a team of the more senior “systems engineers” whose duties included trying to stay abreast of the big trends in the industry so that we could consult with our largest clients.
When the subject was disk drive flying heights or silicon wafer feature sizes, we had little difficulty speaking authoritatively (or bluffing as needed). But I vividly recall in the early 1990s struggling with this very question: “If you develop software and give it away for free (i.e. open source) how do you make a business out of that?”
We never had very good answers. Most of the answers were either services (as in consulting) or added value product layers (or add-on products) that were not free. The add-on products have worked in a number of cases. And a variation on that is to embed the open source kernel within larger products, which happens all the time with UNIX (later BSD and even later Linux). My company was most interested in consulting and this proved a dead end for us with regard to open source.
There is a more modern version of “services” which is not about human consulting, but more typically cloud servers that add value to the “free” open source products. And I believe that is the business model the Muse people are trying to make work. Poking around at the updated Audacity information, it now includes:
Audacity is being developed by Muse Group, which is developing the world’s most popular software and communities for musicians. (emphasis mine)
They want everybody to pay a subscription for the added value services you will really want from the “free” products. Want to share your scores? That’s a subscription. Want to do advanced audio processing (like mastering) for the WAVs you have in Audacity? Maybe that will be a subscription. I think that is what users can expect.
I am extremely averse to subscriptions. Theirs is up to $70 a year (depending on benefit level) and currently includes these features:
It’s disappointing to see a large number of defects in MuseScore 4 flooding their forum. Initially attractive, this is a premature release, clearly. Dorico plays a vastly better quality game, and always with astonishing rapidity to fix critical defects.
There has to be a source of income, just as it is for the rest of us.
I think the tech example is interesting. We worried about who was going to buy that cool technology from that small company or founder, because IT ALMOST ALWAYS HAPPENED.
And then the question becomes whether the tech will remain free or under the same license terms or cost strucure, will it still grow and be supported, or was it bought with the intention (or net effect) of killing it (cough, cough, certain three letter company.) We chose the company as much as we chose the product.
What you get with Steinberg seems pretty transparent. The only issue I have sometimes is whether we are paying them enough. 
And I’m being selfish when I say that - I want them to prosper so that I can keep taking advantage of those tools.
In cases when you can’t see how the money works - then that expression about if you can’t tell who the sucker in the room is, then it’s probably you - that expression comes to mind.
Tantacrul’s big thing is ‘it should just work (with zero knowledge on the part of the user)’ and he judges everything by that yardstick. So if I’m following what they’ve done is made a new playback API that make it possible for the engine to more easily provide realistic playback with less help from the user.
His mistake is he’s thinking too Mac centric which is ‘it just works’. He’s not a software engineer as I’ve been doing for 30 years, the problem with it just works is that can only be true in the sense that ‘it just works the way we think it should work’. Apple goes way to far on that, good software systems should try to make your job as easy as possible, but should not take your job away from you. I can’t use a playback engine I can’t fully control - that’s why I only use NotePerformer for temps.
So cool - for students and hobbyists that fine, but for serious work you need something like Dorico and Nuendo.
tl/dr more reasons if you’re interested …
Unfortunately I think it’s doomed to just be a MS4 feature. Here’s a reason - DAW’s by definition aren’t notation first but MIDI first, so none of them will adopt it - no need or reason to. Now combine that with the fact that no notation program will very probably ever equal a DAW’s mixing capability means that for professional work (where the rendered output matters) this is a non feature. Which notation program mixes to ATMOS, any?
Besides this he’s solving a problem that doesn’t need to be solved. Dorico’s approach works perfectly, there’s playback templates for most libraries you’d use so that’s not a problem, contrary to his implication. Further the Dorico does the heavy lifting into MIDI, which when imported into a DAW can be tweaked a little further if needed for the odd miss. And there it can be rendered into ATMOS which is basically the standard, and because no free program will support ATMOS means using a free program is a non option.
It also misses something - presumably this take ability away from the musician for tweaking? If this thing preprocesses the whole score, where can I go in and give my humanization? This is trivial now in Dorico, if I can’t do it with this thing than no thanks, I want to emphasize my lines personally thank you and not depend on an algorithm to do it, that’s what conducting is for.
I agree, Dan, but you’re not the intended market for this new feature.
I completely agree. I strongly dislike any subscription schemes. I am willing to pay a fair price for useful function and I think Steinberg products are a good value. I would have a great deal of difficulty if they decided to require customers to commit to a subscription, with the implication being that if you ever stopped the subscription, you could no longer use the function.
So true. And THAT could be the business model of Muse. Are they funded by venture capital? If so, then it is quite likely their charge is to build a big user base regardless of the cost, and then flip the company. I’m not saying that is their plan. I have no idea. But it is a very common business plan these days – maybe even the dominant plan among Millennial and early Gen-Zer entrepreneurs. Not necessarily good or bad, but caveat emptor.
MuseScore can never be anything other than free because the code is open-source. So whatever may come in regards to the company, the software is guaranteed to stay free.
Of course future development is a different matter.
Now combine that with the fact that no notation program will very probably ever equal a DAW’s mixing capability
I think you may be under-estimating the future potential of AI, moving at a frightening pace now, to “read” a score and deliver very close approximations of musical intent. Watch that space.