very confused between the .com site and the .org site

• Mar 13, 2019 - 18:35

The first is subscription ok if you want to go that route certainly for professionals
The second is the free version for amateur enthusiasts - great

but getting a link to the right forum is a nightmare, surely the author can do better than that.
I must assume that the paid for download will have different features/problems than the free versions. so you dont want to be reading the wrong forum. They both look identical and you only know by looking at the url for the.com

Please clear up this mess. Both versions have their place so let them clearly identify which they are

Its no good looking at the new piano roll editor only to deduce that its for the paid version for example

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• Mar 13, 2019 - 18:47

This has been highly debatted last summer.

They have made some changes to remove the confusion, but then undone them for ...? I don't know why.

For example the big search field on top of the .org site searches the .com site.
It doesn't help to remove the confusion.

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• Mar 13, 2019 - 18:54

There us no paid-for version of the MuseScore desktop program, Windows, Mac, Linux.
There is a paid-for version of the mobile apps, iOS, Android, and there is a pro account on musescore.com to be able to share more than 5 files. If you pay for it, it's commercial so .com, else .org

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• Mar 13, 2019 - 20:43

I would state this as follows:

MuseScore - the open source notation software that runs on WIndow, macOS, and Linux, is free, period. There is no version of it that is not free. MuseScore itself is not a web site - it is software you run on your computer. The website where you can download that software is musescore.org, and that is also the site where you get support for that software via the Handbook, these forums, etc. That is where you are right now. This site is also completely free - there is nothing on it that requires or even offers the possibility of any kind of subscription (although there are links to other sites that do).

musescore.com is a website that allows you to upload and download scores. That website does have a subscription option, with both free and paid versions available.

There is no "paid for download", then. The software you download is always free, and it doesn't know or care if you have a subscription to musescore.com or not. There are no features in the MuseScore software itself that are only available to people who have paid subscriptions to musescore.com

Now, in addition to all this, there are mobile apps. Some of these might be free, some might be paid, some might involve subscriptions of their own, some might be tied to the subscription on musescore.com - but this too has nothing to do with the MuseScore notation software itself or with musescore.org, the free site where you download it and get support for it.

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• Mar 13, 2019 - 20:57

Well thanx for that - so why cant MS be clear and up front about this. I have no issue about encouraging a paid subscription - thats normal and justifiable for pros. If I were a pro user I would have no problem with $50 pa - bargain but I am just a hobbyist.

The rule in business is make it easy for customers to buy - dont confuse them we are simple souls - just want to make music and maybe share

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• Mar 14, 2019 - 18:56

Yes, but in no way does that constitute wording that in any way conflicts with anything I said. You don't generally learn about the policies, subscription, and payment options of products by inferring things from how search buttons work, you do it by reading actual text statements on the matter. The claim here is that somewhere, some text on some page says something that is in conflict with what I described. I'm asking, where is that text? The only text I see is 100% in agreement with everything I posted.

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• Jan 19, 2021 - 22:55

Deceptive practices are not limited to text. Any attempt to reroute a user from an open source free experience, to paid subscription experience in a way that does not explicitly explain the transition, is deceptive and possibly fraudulent.

Vendors should be extremely wary of these practices. There should be obvious interface elements that explain when users are being redirected to a commercial venture, and why they are doing so.

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• Mar 14, 2019 - 08:20

the only way you know is by the URL in the top window

Why have we got two different sites? Nobody has answered this

If they were the same site but with different domains - ok but they are different and have different domiciles

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• Mar 14, 2019 - 08:44

It is not absolutely necessary to have two different sites, but having two sites for the goals explained by Marc helps to clarify and therefore is a good thing.
The issue is not having two sites, the issue is making clear on the front page what each of them is compared to the other one.
And agree, once you know it, this information is useless, but for newcomers it would help.

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• Mar 14, 2019 - 19:14

The issue is that there is no way to make newcomers to anything, especially on the web, understand something important. The general response to "Please read this ! It's really important!" is to click "OK" without reading. The history of MuseScore, the sale of the web site to UG, and the features of the site and the Application that are specially-tuned to each other giving the impression of a single, seamless thing are just too hard to explain to answer "why ISN'T it the same thing?" and "Why can't you guys have one web site?" is as meaningful and important as major religious schisms (Catholic vs Protestant, Shi`a vs Sunni, Mahayana vs Theravada Buddhism, etc.) are to people outside. It's a problem with human nature and the emulsifying power of the web, People who understand something that most people don't want to understand, or can't, are called "experts."

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• Mar 14, 2019 - 21:12

The "Musescore.com" site provides space for users, who want to upload more than five Musescore files, for a fee.
The "Musescore.org" site, offers the free Musescore software and gives free support to users with the forum.
That's all the difference.

The ".com" site is useless without the Musescore software.

Roughly: "These two are interconnected."

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• Mar 14, 2019 - 21:16

This is overly simple. They are run by two different organizations in different countries. Neither accepts bug reports for the other. One has a highly formalized, effective, and transparent bug reporting and tracking mechanism, and the other ..... "doesn't" (let's leave it at that). There's really very little difference between the United States and Canada -- people speak the same language, dress the same way, etc., but they are different countries under different governments.

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 14:19

As I just said, "it can't be explained in 140 characters". There is no way to "collar" newbies and lecture them about this dichotomy and its historical roots and inversions, as it were. "MuseScore=MuseScore, what else do I have to know?". Do you know ANY site, or human activity, that makes it "clear to newbies" what the complexities are? A "newbie" is almost definitionally someone who has not yet mastered the subtleties and complexities of a subject. A different color won't do it (but it might help).

About triads. roots, and octaves, I am profoundly competent at traditional music theory, yet I do not know what you are attempting to say -- are you talking about a MuseScore problem or missing feature, or a problem in understanding or using traditional Western harmonic structures (which doesn't belong here)?

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 14:57

Well we all started out as newbies so be gentle with us yes it would definitely help , make it pink and call it Musescore Free. Surely thats not rocket science
You see even when you know the secret war its easy to click a disuised link that whips you over to .com version without you realising and you end up a blind alley having wasted you time - how nasty is that
I appreciate the Musescore ethic, highly commendable so why spoil it with this "£$£$%$%^

About triads etc, I had mind crumble pls ignore it refers to another s/w Harmony Navigator HN2 LE which is doing something really dumb

Player just want to make music - not struggle with painfully documented s/w

I use a DAW (Reason) - it is said that you have to work on it several hours/day for a year to become mid range competent. By the time you finish struggling your muse has evaporated. So many modern pseudo songsters use as a tool to hide zero musical talent

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 15:04

This is not about two organizations offering competing versions of the same thing (the religious analogy falls short there), or at war with each other for whatever reason. One offers a software product, for free. The other offers score hosting (especially public visibility of your scores), 5 for free but more for pay, and makes money from ad clicks, not composer subscriptions, It's not MuseScore Free vs MuseScore Pay. They are not competitors; they are in different "businesses" offering different, non-intersecting things..

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 15:49

I am not in any position to speak for MuseScore, but I am pretty sure some of the statements here are not accurate. In particular, I am not sure where the idea that there are two different companies came from, but this is not the case. There is but one MuseScore company. It just happens to produce multiple products, some free, some not, and uses multiple websites. No different from most other companies in this regard.

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 16:06

For the record, I am not an employee of the company, so I "report" to no one in that sense. As has always been the case since the very beginning, most of the developers and people who participate on the forum etc. are not employees, just people helping out as we can.

It doesn't particularly matter to me if the websites are separate or not, but if I were running the company, I would absolutely want separate sites for separate products. Just as, for example, Office365, OneDrive, and from Xbox each have their own websites even though all are Microsoft products, and there are free and paid products and services for each of these.

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 16:16

This is how open source has long worked - most developers are volunteers, maybe there is also a company that employs people to manage it. If a company were able to forbid people from contributing to the development, that's the exact opposite of open source. The folks managing the development - whether in Kaliningrad or France or Germany or wherever they may happen to have been over time - do indeed review contributions to be sure they are good. Again, exactly as pretty much every open source product anywhere works.

I can't really speak to the corporate structure of Ultimate Guitar, it really has little bearing on how MuseScore as open source software works or how any of us might interact with the various paid products the company offers. As a developer, I develop code, I submit pull requests, they get reviewed and either approved or not (sometimes approved after I make recommended changes). This is exactly as it has been since my first PR back in, hmm, 2012 (first "successful" one in 2013).

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 18:05

Ownership of copyright in the source is different from ownership of the product, and no, unless you ask a more specific question, it isn't clear what "ownership of the product" actually means. In any case, specifics of the legalities are beyond anything I can speak to directly, and I don't see the relevance of this to any day to concerns over how anything actually works.

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 19:12

Dodgy stuff going on here. Im in dot org site and want to leave some goof feed back so click the button top rhc and it jumps to the identical looking do com site WTF

same thing when i want to check my profile, it also jumps to do com site which seems to hold my profile detail

WILL SOMEONE GET OFF THE POT AND TELL ME WHATS GOING ON HERE

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 19:16

Which feedback button do you mean? The one on the MuseScore software itself? I don't see any such button on the musescore.org web site. The feedback form does happen to be on msuescore.com. Is there some particular problem you are experiencing with that? It should not affect your life in any way whatsoever which server they happen to place that page on.

As mentioned, by popular request, the same login does work for both sites, this is a good thing.

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 19:38

I am not sure where you got the idea there are rival business involved. MuseScore is MuseScore, there is no rival. They just happen to have different websites for different products and services, much as many other companies with multiple products and serves do. I don't understand how this could possibly be considered any sort of problem. Can some explain in plain (and primarily lower case) English, how your life is negatively impacted by which server some particular web page happens to be stored on?

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 19:53

EVERY DAY P....sorry, every day people post application problems in "Improving MuseScore.com", and require a careful explanation about the history of the company to understand why they are "in the wrong place". Yes, I understand that there could be two fora on the same web site, and the two sites are not the immediate problem. But the schism is.

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• Mar 15, 2019 - 20:15

I agree, the fact that there is no obvious path from msuescore.com to the appropriate place to get help is an issue, and this is something I want to fix. But fixing it doesn't require fundamental changes to the structure of the sites, it just requires clearly placed and clearly worded help pages. So rather than focus on which site is which, let's just to continue to focus on particular cases where improvement is needed, and then we can focus on solving them without worrying about redesigning the entire world.

So far, we have:

1) need a more clear way to access help resources for the MuseScore software from the score sharing website

What else?

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• Mar 24, 2020 - 00:43

I love MuseScore for what it has done for my students and for my own projects. I don't consider myself a newbie having worked with notation software since the Mark of the Unicorn days. My students are newbies, however. When schools shut down, I recommended that all of my students download MuseScore on their home computers. Not having noticed the .com/.org difference, several downloaded the mobile app and were frustrated that they had to pay to open MuseScore files that I had created for them. The problem is easily remedied but it would be better to make it easier for the new user to get it right on the first try. Thanks for this great app.

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• Mar 24, 2020 - 06:43

Make sure your directions to your pupils/students are clear enough to guide them to musescore.org.
Or make it a learning task, "find the MuseScore program and install on your PC".
Actually it seems you did, but still they downloadwd the mobile app to their mobile device, guess that should give them a bad mark for failing to follow their task?

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• Mar 24, 2020 - 10:50

FWIW, there are countless websites/web-hosted services that require downloading an app to use them, or use them fully. For someone not a computer expert, the idea that the MuseScore program and site have such a relationship is hardly crazy. Wikipedia has disambiguation pages. Google does not. To me, "Tesla lets employees go" means Kolman Czito, the inventor's lab assistant. Yes, there is a connection between the inventor and the company, but not the same as with "Ford". In our case, one didn't die 80 years ago. The difference between the two maybe-organizations, or Binity, or whatever it is, is something you only learn after a while. Each site should have HUGE banners declaring "THIS IS FRULARI STREET. IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR FROULARI STREET, THAT IS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF TOWN", as it were. Confusion is to be expected.

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• Mar 24, 2020 - 16:17

"A bad mark? Which instruction did they not followed ? Between the one with an iPad who get a non free program called MuseScore and the one next to him with his MS-Surface who was lucky enough to get a free program also called MuseScore ?"

An ipad is a tablet. There is no MuseScore notation software for any tablet or phone.
A Surface is technically not a tablet. It runs a version of Windows 10. Therefore it can run notation software.

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• Mar 24, 2020 - 17:38

It used to be the only personal computer there was, the IBM-compatible x86 ones running MS-DOS. There were Atari and others, Apple II, but it was not until the Mac came out that the term began to be restricted to x86 boxes (Mac ran on 68000 at that time). In the late 80's, Windows came out, and by the early 90's became the only way of using x86 boxes, as that hardware line evolved. Way later Macs moved to x86 hardware.

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• Nov 3, 2024 - 14:35

After using both softwares, Musescore.org on MackBook and Musescore.com on iPad Pro for over 2 years, I realized they are not using same symbols. I have been scanning music and modifing music sheet by "org" software on Mackbook, and then uploaded it to ".org". Then, I downloaded the music sheet from "org" to iPad Pro for playing music.

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• Nov 4, 2024 - 06:48

And your scores will go to the .com site, where it's not the default to make them public domain unless you're very specific/careful. Been that way for years. I'm a bit over the complexity of trying to download what I would like to be public domain/no restrictions scores that are hundreds of years old and out of copyright, only to find people needed to pay for them on the .com site (which I think is Russian) because I didn't click numerous boxes.
Buying a subscription to the .com site sounds dangerous to your credit card...either through misunderstanding or rapacious credit card re-charging. I guess the lesson is, like for everywhere on the web: be EXTREMELY careful who you give your credit card details, or at least know how to cancel your card quickly LOL!

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