User Velocities not carried over from v3 to v4.1

• Sep 17, 2024 - 17:50

I have a beautiful sounding piano score in my Musescore 3 project where each note has its own user velocity. I had originally imported it from a midi file of an actual performance, hence the realistic data. It sounds really solid in playback. I can see in the Inspector pane "Velocity type: User" and "Velocity: 90" for example.

When I open the score up in 4.1, all of the velocities have suddenly been set to 64? It seems like they are not translating. All of my precious humanization data appears to be lost and now my score sounds like a robot in playback. In the Properties pane I can check every note and they are all say Velocity 64. So rough.

I am shocked that it seems possible this was a missed feature in MS4, I guess maybe it's just not the most common workflow? I get that most people probably construct their score from scratch in Musescore and rely on the dynamics markings for that, but all my stuff is imported from midi. (This isn't even scratching the surface of the fact that the 'Import Pane' is gone in MS4 which makes zero sense to me, forcing me to import MIDI in MS3 and then convert to MS4 after)

I did some research/due diligence before posting this and found some posts about offset velocity not being imported correctly from 3 to 4, but those posts seemed to imply that the user velocity was working properly, which I am not seeing. I do not use offset velocity.

Either way, I am hoping there will be a fix for it. Honestly, if not then MS4 will be totally unusable for me even despite some of the improvements it made. Any help would be much appreciated.

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• Sep 17, 2024 - 21:20

@moonlapsepiano wrote

> I have a beautiful sounding piano score in my Musescore 3 project where each note has its own user velocity. When I open the score up in 4.1, all of the velocities have suddenly been set to 64.

> I am hoping there will be a fix for it. Honestly, if not then MS4 will be totally unusable for me even despite some of the improvements it made.

Can you share your score here?

I feel your pain on this issue!

Improved playback was one of MuseScore 4.0's primary goals. Much effort has be devoted to the cause and significant success has been achieved. So I find it incredible that development views note velocity as dispensable when actually the variance between individual "note volumes" is a monumental cornerstone of music expression.

Note velocity was simply ignored with Muse Sounds since MS 4.0 ... but now, on opening any legacy score, MS 4.4.2 flattens all velocity values to 64. And after saving the MS 4.4.2 score all your meticulous velocity humanizations are permanently lost.

Contextually one can argue that velocity is completely unimportant because MuseScore is really just for notation. But if so then why all the effort in creating Muse Sounds and the headline announcements touting hugely improved playback?

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• Sep 18, 2024 - 05:01

Yeah I find their stance to be somewhat baffling. The only reasonable argument I've heard is that it's just not a problem for the majority of users and that they are planning to build a new velocity system over time. So maybe interacting closely between MIDI and sheet music is not as common of a workflow as I would think. I'd imagine a lot of people want to translate performances into their scores in order A. save time on engraving manually and B. have fully humanized velocity from the get-go making the playback experience much better.

When it comes down to it, playback on Musescore is a big thing and a lot of people listen to it. So I can't imagine what they were thinking when they totally removed the ability to velocity to translate from MS3 to MS4. I don't really think Musescore is 'just for notation' or else it wouldn't have all this talk about improved playback, I totally agree with you. I always listen to playback for every score I like.

By the way, I just tested version by version and noticed that this actually is still broken in 4.4.0 (this is when the problem was introduced). I just had to downgrade to 4.3.2 in order to have my velocities preserved when I opened the score which had last been opened in 3.6.2. And because there is no import pane anymore, I still need to use 3.6.2 to import all my MIDI cleanly from Reaper. For example, having the option to set the amount of voices, split staff or not, clef changes or not, is critical to my workflow.

It absolutely does nothing for me to just drag a midi file into MS4 and have it just automatically try to interpret how I wanted it to be presented.

Are you looking to see my score for troubleshooting purposes? If so I can upload it, but it is not yet complete in terms of actually looking pretty lol.

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• Sep 18, 2024 - 06:37

Well said ...

Indeed, we're both baffled by MuseScore 4's "velocity non gratis."

I find leveled velocities very wearing when editing or practicing along ... and a dearth of velocities kills any attempt at making a realistic/enjoyable recording. The highest quality samples or synths can't overcome the flattening.

It's for these reasons you didn't hear Mozart's K446 D minor concerto or Clair de Lune or Ballade Op. 19 by Gabriel Fauré or Bach's F minor Adagio from BWV 1056 on player pianos. Those old upright paper "players" favored stride-style and ragtime piano ... because it sounded "okay" when banged out.

...  ---  ...

And yes. I requested your score for troubleshooting, to see and hear it in MS3 with velocities in tack, and then to import to MS4 and hear it denuded. If you prefer not to post you can PM me.

scorster

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• Sep 22, 2024 - 04:48

@moonlapsepiano
> here's the score, since it won't let me DM it to you.

That's odd that about the DM. I'll have to look into that.

Scores like Romina live or die by note velocity. It sounds good in MuseScore 3 ... but after MuseScore 4.2 levels all the velocities we have a lot of heavy banging notes.

BTW, I note that Romina's MS3 velocities were of the User flavor. I thought I read that only Offset velocities were leveled, so I guess refused to believe that this also happened to User velocities, even though I vaguely remembered that happening.

It's foundational issues like these velocity behaviors that prevent me from engaging with MS4 for production. I only use MuseScore 4 occasionally, just to check audio quality, engraving improvements and new features; also to see what's on the horizon, and to post bug reports, regressions, UI/UX issues and requests.

For these reason I don't find MuseScore 4 an enjoyable experience:

• its UI is awkward for me (too much digging for settings and too many bugs)
• too many missing 3.x features
• though MS4's audio quality is quite compelling, in reality I find that MuseSounds almost always leads to frustration—this means that frequently it's not fun to listen to a score during the editing phase; and generated audio files are disappointing and embarrassing, so I have to rely on MIDI export to DAW.
• MuseFX are limited, weird, poorly labeled and—as of this post—they are completely undocumented.
• rarely can I finish a project before finding a new showstopping bug directly in my path

So I continue with MS Evolution 3.7

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• Sep 19, 2024 - 03:43

Ouch
Thanks for alerting at least me to yet another serious problem with 4+.
I have not used it due to its other numerous shortcomings; ignoring and discarding dynamics is serious.
I still do all my work in 3.7 and only download and open the latest to check it out, and then put it away in disgust. I too remember when they used to say it was primarily for notation, only to now brag about their sound quality. Ear of the beholder, I guess.

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