Leave Sibelius for MuseScore? Or not?
Are there any former Sibelius users here who are satisfied with MuseScore? Or did you find yourself going back to Sibelius?
Here's my situation. I've been a Sibelius user since version 1.4 for Windows. I still have Sib 5.2, but haven't used it in a few years--the regular job crowded composition out of my life. I am now wanting to get back into composing. So I'm faced with the choice of re-learning (and probably upgrading) Sibelius, or perhaps moving on to something else. I am not pleased with what's happened to Sibelius in the last few years. And I especially do not want to get into the trap of renting software that will stop working if I stop paying.
My focus will be on chamber music (piano, winds, strings), songs and choral music for real people to play and sing. I don't need avant-garde notation, though I do change meter here and there. I don't care if my score and parts meet the most exacting engraver's standards, as long as they are easy to read and play from. Facile note entry, cut/copy/paste, transpose and alter is important. Decent MIDI playback is important for aural proofing and giving a prospective performer an idea of the music, but it doesn't have to fool anyone into thinking it's the Berlin Philharmonic. I just want the software to work. I don't want to spend endless hours and days tweaking the software instead of composing.
Sticking with Sibelius is probably the easiest option, but I an looking at both MuseScore and Notion as leaner alternatives that might do the job. This article gave me much food for thought, but is short on specifics: http://www.georgehess.net/notation-wars/
Thoughts? Advice? I'd like to hear from others with similar needs before I spend time trying things.
Thanks!
--Peter Klein
Comments
In some ways, I'm not really the right person to answer in that a) I'm biased since I am one of the developers of MuseScore, and b) I was a Finale user, not a Sibelius user, when I made the switch. But I do think my comments might be useful.
Basically, my situation 5 years ago was similar to yours in some ways, different in others. Similar in that I was using expensive commercial software and wanted an alternative that didn't keep me locked into paying for yearly updates, and one I could just feel better about supporting. Also in that I write music for real musicians to perform, but didn't necessarily need professional engraving quality - just good results. The differences are that I was using Finale rather than Sibelius, that I was still a very active power user of Finale (I would not have had to re-learn anything to stick with it), and that I am a programmer.
Overall, I would say I had less incentive to change than you. Finale in 2011 was in a better position than Sibelius in 2016 in terms of future viability, and I didn't have that whole rent thing to deal with. Plus I didn't have to re-learn anything to stick with Finale. Plus, five years ago, MuseScore was clearly *not* as full featured as it is now, nor did it produce results as good as it does now.
For me, what made the difference was believing in the idea of open source software. That a group of people who wanted a freely available tool would get together and create one, and continue to work to make it better motivated not by marketing but on real needs. I could see that even where it might not quite be as powerful as what I was accutomed to at the moment, it was clearly moving that direction, and that I (and other users) could be a part of the process of defining that direction.
Five years later, I am elated I made the choice I did. Whatever things MuseScore did not do as well as Finale in 2011, it did them well enough that I could still do what I needed, and it does most of them *better* than Finale now. And I can't tell you how good it feels to have been part of this project.
Basically, all three tools - four, including Notion (which wasn't on my radar in 2011) - are perfectly capable of doing the kind of things you or I might need. But MuseScore is the one that I could really behind and *believe* in and be a part of in some way (even before I started actively contributing as a developer, I was contributing ideas).
To me, this is more important than any laundry list of specific features or limitations. The programs are far more similar than different - any of them could do the job. It's more about which you feel the best about using.
Check out this link for MuseScore use cases, some similar to yours:
https://musescore.org/en/node/16153
Regards.
Welcome, Peter! I've used MuseScore exclusively for several years but only experimented with the Sibelius 7.5 trial version, so I also can't really compare and contrast. However, I hope I can address the specific questions you bring up.
For most work, you can get beautifully readable sheet music with very little tweaking needed. The more things you add above and below the staff, the more adjustments are required. MuseScore 2 does not have a feature comparable to Sibelius's Magnetic Layout, which automatically prevents score elements from colliding or overlapping (e.g., if you add a tempo change and a rehearsal mark to the same measure, they'll be on top of each other). However, that feature was only introduced in Sibelius 6—so I imagine you're accustomed to having to spend that time fixing things with SIbelius 5. In most cases it's as simple as dragging a rehearsal mark off off a tempo marking. Attached is a sample part created with MuseScore (for a piece which will premiere next month), and nobody from the viola section has seemed to have any trouble reading it.
Huron_River_Andante-Viola.pdf
Sibelius has a mode for real-time transcription from a MIDI keyboard that MuseScore 2 is currently lacking (though there's a programmer working on it over the summer). Other than that, for "step-time" MIDI keyboard entry, regular computer keyboard entry, or mouse entry, it's pretty much 100% identical in MuseScore and Sibelius. You won't have any problems adjusting there. For your convenience, here's the relevant documentation from the MuseScore Handbook: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/note-input
Cut/copy/paste are all there as you would expect to find them, with a selection filter, controls to select similar elements, and the awesome [R] shortcut that is also in Sibelius. Full details at https://musescore.org/en/handbook/copy-and-paste.
Transposition is quite facile in MuseScore. Transposing instruments work automatically, and can optionally be viewed in concert pitch in the score and transposed in the linked parts, and there is a "Transpose" dialog which is very similar to Sibelius. See https://musescore.org/en/handbook/transposition.
I'm not sure what you mean by "alter," but you can certainly change things after you enter them.
I like MuseScore's playback a lot better than Sibelius's, but that something you'll have to judge for yourself. Here's a sample with all the default playback settings: https://musescore.com/classicman/scores/887471
Anyway, if you're interested in a much more in-depth look at various scorewriters than in George Hess's piece, Robert Smelser reviewed a bunch. His two-part review of MuseScore is a little out-of-date, but you'll get some information from it: https://simplyrobert.wordpress.com/2014/08/11/musescore/ followed by https://simplyrobert.wordpress.com/2015/02/17/musescore-2-0-beta/
In general, I would say that going from Sibelius 5.2 to MuseScore 2.0.3 is a genuine upgrade, and it's well worth spending twenty minutes trying things out.
P.S. The other day MuseScore retweeted one user's opinion on exactly your question: https://twitter.com/musescore/status/724830575085916160
I made the switch from Sibelius 7 to MuseScore originally due to availability and financial issues but I have to admit I don't regret the switch now that the new version has that keyboard. That was always the big feature for me with Sibelius and the one in MuseScore 2 is even easier to use, so I'm completely delighted with it. Actually "Bonkers" might describe it better; ever since I downloaded the AppImage I haven't been able to leave the computer alone. I'm back to being a power user. You'll have to try it but I think you'll like it.
In reply to I made the switch from by shelemrakefet
A big thank-you to all who responded. Marc and Isaac, thank you for all the detailed info and links. There are some very nice people on this forum!
It does look like MuseScore could do the job. So it's a question of what I would give up (besides having to pay $89/year to stay current!) if I abandon Sibelius. I haven't dug into MuseScore itself yet. But in my reading of the docs, note entry and editing seem about equal in ease of use.
I have some work-in-progress sitting in Sib 5, which doesn't export to MusicXLM. But there is a free plug-in that does: http://www.musicxml.com/dolet-plugin/ So I probably won't lose anything if I make the switch.
The main three things that come to mind that Sib has that MuseScore doesn't are real-time MIDI note entry, collision avoidance (aka "magnetic layout"), and support for VSTs and other such advanced playback options. Real-time entry is nice, but I've never used it much. I understand that collision avoidance is being worked on. So really, the options for sound output is the only obvious area where Sib is the clear winner. I'll ask a couple of questions about that in another thread.
Finally, has anyone had the "amateur program" stigma come up? Has anyone (performer, publisher, etc.) ever rejected your work simply because it was scored in MuseScore?
Thanks!
--Peter
In reply to A big thank-you to all who by peteraklein
Your score looks as good as the effort you put into *making* it look good. My scores created with MuseScore look better, I dare say, than msot of my colleagues scores created with Finale or Sibelius. So mostly I just get compliments from musicians (and surprise when they learn a free program can produce such good results. As for publishers, the only one I've worked directly with re-typesets everything themselves anyhow, so it's pretty irrelevant what I use.
In reply to A big thank-you to all who by peteraklein
MuseScore does have VST support via the Jack Audio Connection Kit and Carla
It's a bit tricky to set up, but once it's done you can interface with DAWs, VST orchestras such as Garritan Personal Orchestra, and apply a multitude of effects to your audio should you so desire, and if you needed help with setting it up I have already trodden a well-worn path there for Windows machines.
Incidentally my history is very similar to Marc's - I was using Finale 3 for a long time for producing the scores I need in my work as a church music director, but was becoming aware that it was time to upgrade, the price of which, even with educational/charitable institution discount, made me cough heavily!
Fortunately before I parted with my hard-earned cash I decided to see whether the Open Source world had anything available. This was the point where I discovered MuseScore. This was just before MuseScore 1.11 was released, but I was so impressed with the results I was getting from 1.10, together with the attitude of the community that I dumped Finale completely, began to help by providing technical support on the forums, then gravitated to providing a few bug-fixes. But my background in XG MIDI programming and studio techniques pretty much forced me into the role I play now as custodian of the default soundfont.
If you decide to make the switch, you will find that you have a very dedicated community behind you to guide you through your first steps. Questions on the forum are often answered in minutes, by members of the development team. Sadly you will not find that kind of support from Avid, even disregarding it's extremely shaky current circumstances.
In reply to A big thank-you to all who by peteraklein
I am a composer, arranger, and music publisher, and we do not use anything but MuseScore for music typography. Our scores are as good or better than anything produced by the major publishers, and it is in large part MuseScore which makes this possible. As has been said, the program is capable of producing a professional-quality score if the user takes the time--and has developed the graphic design skills--to make good use of the tools it provides. The proverb has it that a carpenter is only as good as his tools, but the tools alone can't build a house.
On the 'amateur program' thing: I think there is a certain bias amongst users of Finale (and probably Sibelius, too), that only their expensive commercial software is 'professional,' but I am convinced that most of that is due to their having made a substantial financial commitment to purchase it, and the embarrassment of having to admit that a free program does as good or better a job. In addition there is always the spectre of having to learn a new program (which is understandable; I use Dreamweaver to create webpages and no matter how much I dislike Macromedia Corporation, I do NOT want to have to learn a new program at my age!).
OTOH, no one has ever called our editions 'amateur', not even a die-hard Finale user with whom I collaborate frequently (thanks to music XML...). On the contrary a well-known musicologist from the U.S., most of whose editions are published by Barenreiter, recently asked us if we could produce some scores he wanted to self-publish. Considering he is used to the quality of Barenreiter, I consider that to be very high praise indeed.
The playback is what it is, and although it's not great, I seriously doubt that any other scorewriter does much better. If someone wants to go to the trouble and expense of installing premium soundfonts and spending hours tweaking sound envelopes and essentially trying to bully a scorewriter into behaving like a Moog synthesizer, he/she can do that. But for me (and I suspect for most users), playback is simply a convenience, not an end-in-itself. (That said, it must be added that the MuseScore team is constantly working on improving the basic soundfonts that come with the program. So things are always getting better.)
Why don't you download MuseScore's free trial and give it a go? You've absolutely nothing to lose!
BTW, MuseScore's "free trial" never expires ;)
In reply to Why don't you download by shoogle
Yes, give it a try. You can have both on your machine.
Another "late" reply to this post.
Few years ago I was using any version of Finale I could find broken on the inet until I found a problem, or it would stop working or whatever. As a student with very low income I can say that Musescore has been a great solution especially compared to other expensive music notation software. If you learn the shortcuts it will be as easy as using Finale or Sibelius, plus, it's free and you have the option to donate to the creators. I mostly write choral work where there is a lot of copy-paste, both in notation and lyrics. Truthfully, I did have a bit of difficulty using it at the start, same as any other software, but still, it works better than I even expected. You can still create your own shortcuts to make it easier for you. Another con to use Musescore is that there are updates and you can have any help you want from the developers themselves, which in my humble opinion, is awesome. The exported files to wav or midi work juuuust fine. All in all, Musescore does everything that any other software does, and I think it's more user friendly (for both composers and musicians) than others. In conclusion, I think it's a very easy software to use, user friendly, works very well, the developers have done an excellent job creating it and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone.
Again, many thanks to all. The people on this forum are the best! The issues are complex, but at least I have a couple of months to decide before my ability to upgrade Sibelius expires. I have downloaded MuseScore and will play with it as soon as I get some concentrated time.
Since I own an older version of Sibelius and have some work-in-progress in it, there is some incentive to stay on board. I may shell out my 89 bucks--this time. But I can't see myself paying that every year for the rest of my life. Given that, I think I need to get to know MuseScore even if I don't switch to it right away.
The "escape clause" is MusicXML, which provides a base "lingua franca" for porting much of a score's content between programs. There's a plug-in, conveniently provided by the Finale folks, which will enable my copy of Sibelius 5 to export my existing work-in-progress. So I'm not stuck, and neither are most other people.
Avid should be aware that they are not a large-scale virtual monopoly like MS or Adobe. And even there, some people have moved away from both Office and Photoshop in response to the "rent me" schemes. I'm not sure that it's a sound business strategy to rely on forced annual rental fees from the small core of professionals who absolutely can't change.
Unless one's workplace demands "the standard," there are perfectly good alternatives to the 800 pound gorillas. And tactics like deliberate format incompatiblities coupled with pseudo-upgrades that really aren't just create resentment. For any of you old enough to remember the MS-DOS days, recall PKZIP and what happened to them when they tried to claim a royalty over all files compressed with their program? Everyone dropped them, and they faded away.
--Peter
In reply to Again, many thanks to all. by peteraklein
Interesting posts and of course the main question.
As being involved in music publishing industry (one smaller part), we are interested in switching to MuseScore, but first we should be assured that there is a bright future of MuseScore, openness and flexibility.
There is one thing that are vague here: no major publisher uses MuseScore, as well no hi quality edited scores are found; for me it seems that a lot of amateurs are polluting the Internet with their scores thus creating a feeling that MuseScore does it "bad".
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I have of course nothing against amateurs, God forbid!, but it is almost extremely rare to find a high-end quality edited virtuoso made score in MuseScore. For instance:
...if one wants to create a score in Finale of Brian Ferneyhough, it could be done. How about MuseScore, can't someone of very knowledgable MuseScore-persons make one snippet of it?
In reply to Interesting posts and of by edizioneo
See www.promusicaspiritus.com for an example of a small professional publisher which uses MuseScore exclusively.
As for the snippet in your post--and the works of Ferneyhough and his ilk in general--yes, I could make that using MuseScore, but to be perfectly honest, I can't imagine why I would ever need to. Scores like that get such a microscopically limited distribution that the composer's time would be better spent writing them out by hand. This is FAR easier and faster for stuff like this than using any scorewriter, and if the composer actually does manage to find someone interested in performing the piece, the manuscript score can be rented for the performance (which is common practise for most works in this genre).
As an example, I will mention a very dear friend, a world-class recorder player and chamber musician, who recently entered a predictable phase of his career (it happens to all top level performers and conductors at some point) wherein his familiarity with the established repertoire led him to experiment for a short time with contemporary works in search of 'new challenges'. At a concert at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts last year, he programmed a piece which required him to arrange eight music stands in a circle on stage, and to sit on an office-style swivel chair in the center of them. Each music stand held a 65cm by 100cm part (that's a bit over 2 feet x 3 feet), written out on manually-scribed staff paper with various coloured felt-tips. As the performer, he was required to sit on that swivel chair and spin to face various music stands in a particular order and rhythm, all the while coaxing special sound effects out of his instrument (fipple-shrieks, flutter-glottissing, inhalation tones, finger-slaps...). The score had been rented from the composer's widow (he committed suicide shortly after composing it); I saw it closely when I helped my friend carry it out to his car after the concert. There was little on it that any scorewriter could have been bullied into reproducing.
I know we're getting into artistic-judgement terrain here, but there is no way to avoid that in this discussion, because the effort required to make a scorewriter produce certain graphics must be balanced by the potential return as evaluated by the number of use-cases for that graphic capability. Much if not most of this sort of 'sound-art' (I think it needs a different name than 'music') is highly conceptual and often blends the visual and performing arts into the product. There is no reasonable need to build all that into a scorewriting program designed to produce notation based on 500+ years of standardised practise--the 'alphabet' of the musical language, as it were. Can you imagine demanding that a text typography program include the ability to randomly alter the size, shape, alignment, and colour density of alphabetic characters simply because an avant-garde author decided that was the only way to communicate his intent?
In reply to no major publisher uses by Recorder485
I am very interested in MuseScore, FLOSS ideology, Public Domain, and I am willing to support it.
So far I enjoy MuseScore very much.
Honestly speaking, at that website they have just 5 scores, and I am unable to 'see inside'. I am not sure what is professional there: editorial team, engraving, etc. Also, a publisher that publishes complex orchestral material, inclusive scores and parts, is something that I would like to see. (complex = Ravel, Mahler, Strauss, Messiaen, Bartok...).
Because we just want to see what MuseScore can do.
This is an overloaded exaggeration. This example is not sound art or whatever, perhaps your post is referring to something else, but I don't. The example above is a perfectly clear western notation. Nothing is unusual there. You simple want to stamp it as "irregular and ridiculous" so that we can be back on some simple domain.
To built what "all"? This is quite a discriminative answer. Music of 20 and 21 century is perfectly equal music to all music from 1500. The difference between some Monteverdi and Scriabin Sonata 7 is more than from Scriabin to Ferneyhough.
Yes, the text typography does it all. Take any magazine at your first shop. Or you want all to be printed Black-White on yellow paper?
Also, the problem is not IF the software can or cannot produce quality output. For sure one can use Illustrator or Inkscape to produce perfectly looking scores.
In reply to I am very interested in by edizioneo
I do think we are going off topic here. The question was if peteraklein will be well served if he decides to switch to Musescore. If Musescore can do things that he probably won't want to do is irrelevant.
In reply to I do think we are going off by azumbrunn
@azumbrunn... Indeed, as stated by the OP:
My focus will be on chamber music... songs and choral music for real people to play and sing. I don't need avant-garde notation, though I do change meter here and there.
I believe that for his stated purpose, MuseScore is a perfect match.
Regards to all.
"Thoughts? Advice? I'd like to hear from others with similar needs before I spend time trying things."
I hope this is not too late.
My first notation program was called Mozart. It was ABC based and in retrospect the graphics were, perhaps, a bit coarse. When I started teaching composing and arranging in a sixth form college I had to learn Sibelius in order to teach with it. I got a copy of Sibelius 3 at home and later a copy of version 5. By the time I retired college was using Sibelius 6. I was quite happy sticking with Sibelius 5 at home until I moved from Windows to Linux. I eventually got a version of Sibelius 3 working under a Linux umbrella called 'Wine' It was clunky, unreliable and crashed a lot.
MuseScore works perfectly. I was impressed with how easy it was to move from Sibelius to MuseScore. I can do several things the same way, like copy and paste, Ctrl + L for lyrics and Ctrl + K for chord symbols. Where things are difficult I find that the online Manual is excellent.
However, if your version of Sib 5 still works OK you could just stick with that.