Native midi in and out support

• Aug 25, 2014 - 17:16

Would be nice to have native midi in and out support. I know supposedly this is possible with JACK but I can't get JACK to work and i don't think I am alone in this. I understand musescore supposed to be multi os and midi is different on each os but windows 7 is not making it easy at all to get JACK to work.


Comments

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I finally got JACK working but it was a pain to figure out that the switches in the command line has to be in certain exact order. So I will take it back maybe musescore doesn't absolutely have to have built in midi support but there should be robust instruction to get it working with JACK as a lot of people use it with midi keyboard.

Same for me. It really was a headache to get this Jack thing working properly for Midi output. I’m pretty sure that lots of people therefore abandon to have Musescore work via Midi output thus frustrating themselves to use Musescore with the free Fantasia sampler for instance and hear their compositions via other sound libraries. Even the first level of a commercial library at 75 $(including the corresponding Player) still sounds far better than the local Musescore soundfont. Now Musescore really is a great notation software much more user friendly than any other commercial notation soft I tried out. Finally it all depends on what you want to do: Make nice notation sheets or make nice music. Personally I would like to do both. While composing it surely is more pleasant to hear a real clarinet when you put a note on the corresponding stave.
Musescore 2.0 was announced to be issued with improved Jackaudio , but unfortunately it didn’t work at all. I recently put a post for the team and hope they will abandon this Jack issue and work on the possibility of native in and out Midi support which would definitely put Musescore on the top level of notation software (free and commercial).

In reply to by leonardus

You mention the "local soundfont", but have you tried any others? Installing and using another soundfont is far easier than buying and setting up external synths, and in my experience sounds at least as good. And in 2.0, even the default soundfont will be much better than the one in 1.3 and will sound as good as or better than many inexpensive commercial products.

But 2.0 has neither been announced nor released. All that exists is a *Beta*, meaning an experimental pre-release for people to try out and report issues. Jack *is* supposed to work in 2.0, and does, or at least did shortly before release of the Beta, in the cases tested. If there are issues currently in some specific subset of cases, they'll be fixed before release of the real 2.0.

So Jack *will* be a viable option. There's no need to abandon a perfectly workable solution that is already implemented. For the relatively few people who feel the need to set up external synthesizers to squeeze a little bit more out of the playback, Jack *will* work. But the vast majority of users, simply using a soundfont within MuseScore itself will be completely sufficient. Again, the default soundfont is much improved in 2.0 Beta 1 over 1.3, but it will remain possible to install others.

That's not to say there is no chance of anyone ever implementing MIDI out - although making it work across all three platforms supported by MuseScore would be much easier said than done. But it's pretty safe to say there is no way that would find it's way into 2.0 when there is a perfectly good solution - Jack - already implemented. If it has bugs, keep reporting them, and they wil be fixed.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

So, the ear is a very subjective thing. Nobody hears the same and that makes humanity interesting and very complicated. We’ll do it with mister Jack audio, but as indicated in my post dd September 16th 9.07 pm , on MS2.0 with Windows 7 I failed to get anything out via Jackaudio. I attached an ODT file with a screenshot displaying technical date which could be helpful to you in case this is a bug. Anyway, huge thanks for Musescore 1.3 untill now which I use with pleasure on different commercial sound librairies which in addition have the possibility to access lots of different articulations per instrument simply by putting a note out of the range of the instrument.
Again, thanks for all that was achieved untill now.

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