Insanely ambitious project idea - Open Anthology of Western Music

I looked at a whole bunch of the examples from that critique of MuseScore, and as far as I can tell, most are criticisms of the engraving decisions made, not anything the software itself is doing wrong. The very few comments that turned out to represent bugs in the software have already been fixed. And somehow, it seems quite unfair to judge 2.0 too harshly with respect to bugs when it is still *months* away from any sort of release.

So while those were interesting and valid (if someowhat subjective) critiques of one particular score created by one particular engraver using 2.0, but I don't see how one can possibly see it as an indictment fo the software itself. Unless you believe the software should just automatically do everything perfectly, with no manual adjustments of any kind ever needed. That's a nice pipe dream, and I suppose Lilypond tries to chase it with varying degrees of success, but in the world of WYSIWYG notation software, it's just expected that you'll need to adjust some things manually. Which is to say, it's highly unlikely Finale or Sibelius would have done significantly better out of the box (Sibelius' "magnetic layout" feature notwithstanding). People accustomed to producing manuscript for publication using notation software expect to need to make some adjustments, and as someone who has done this using both Finale and MuseScore, I really no evidence whatsoever that MuseScore is not up to the task for most scores. There are a couple of existing bugs that I hope and expect to see fixed - handling of collisipns of second in multivoice context, etc. But they'll be more likely to be fixed for 2.0 if we start actually pushing on things harder. And even if they don't all get fixed (and it's practically a given than any release of any software still has *some* bugs), I and others have become pret adept at the workarounds.

So, if you personally would rather wait to particupate until more things are done automatically, that's fine, but really, I see MuseScore doing as well as any other software overall.

I agree the availability of the scores is more important than nitpicking about the finer points of engraving, but I can also see that you don't want to just put *anything* out there. Well, there is value in that too, but there is actually no shortage of poorly scanned or haphazardly engraved music out there for educators to use a resource, and believe me, we do use these. I do think the extra effort spend coming up with something "better" than what random people might submit on their own is worth it, but I also agree that this doesn't necessarily require any special Kickstarter-style funding of experts. The basic Wikipedia model does indeed work, even if we might quibble about the ease of use of the software currently used. Anyhow, I'm not saying we "need" to have hired experts; just brainstorming how money could possibly be spent were it to exist. lasconic is of course right that funding the infrastructure is ultimate more important.

So what I can see is a general Wikipedia-style library of scores that all conform to certain standards of formatting and quality, enforced collectively somehow. Any score could be submitted and approved provided it is deemed "notable" enough and that the engraving is up to the proper standards. So starting points would be developing the technological framework for this - perhaps leverage some existing wiki technologies, perhaps leveraging musescore.com - and also developing appropriate formatting and quality standards. Just getting that together could easily take long enough that 2.0 is ready by then, but again, that doesn't mean people couldn't start preparing scores with 1.2 if they felt like it - there just might not be anywhere to submit them to yet, and they might need a final round of editing to adhere to the as-yet-developed formatting standards.

If this Wikipedia-style collection were sufficiently well organized and indexed, the need for a curated list of "representative" scores would be lessened. If you want a Bach fugue, you could see a list of all Bach fugues that were part of the collection. The wiki model (again, in principle, if not in terms of actual technologies) would hopefully be sufficient to guarantee a certain level of quality. No reason people couldn't share their own "representative" lists, much as one might share playlists on Spotify.

FWIW, one nice point about having something like this done as a collection of MSCZ files rather than PDF files (aside from the obvious fact that you can *do* more with an MSCZ file) - it means that as MuseScore is improved, the same scores can potentially look better and better over time with relatively little effort expended. On the other hand, yes, loading a score into a new version and making sure nothing is lost and that improvements are actually taken advantage of does require *some* effort, which is also why the idea of a master "curated" list that gets this treatment seems useful while other scores end up being more static (submitted then forgotten about). What I can see is having the whole library available online, but making the "curated" list available as an app, or perhaps selling hardcopy versions. So anyhow, the "curation" aspect of selecting material seems less important to me now, but developing a good set standards and the technologies to make this all available seems more so.