Musescore is amazing!
Awhile ago at my school, I wrote a not-so-good amateur song, and after writing the song, I began an interest in composing. My school had Finale 2004 on their computers, so when I was done with my assignments, I used Finale to write music. I wanted to get Finale at my home so that I can write music at home, but then I noticed that it would cost me way more money then I had to buy Finale. I wondered if there were any other music programs, so I searched on the internet, I found Sibelius. It was expensive also, so I tried to look for something like those programs that was free. The first thing I found was Musescore. It was so great. In my first night using Musescore, I already wrote a composition with it because it was so simple. Since then, I have been using Musescore nearly every day. Do any of you agree with me? Do you have any similar stories? Post them here!
Comments
I do not have any particularly interesting story to tell, but MuseScore IS great. My only previous experience with music engraving programs was with Lilypond, as the examples I saw from friends using Finale did not seem to me worth spending such an amount of money (no friend of mine seems to use Sibelius...).
When I finally met MuseScore (that was a couple of years ago), its engraving quality (almost comparable with Lilypond's but MUCH easier to obtain), together with its unbeatable price tag, instantly bought me! Since then, MuseScore has further improved, so any other competitor should fight very hard to win me away from MuseScore!
M.
There was actually a sort of similar thread started a few days back, where a few of us shared stories of how we "discovered" MuseScore.
At some point soon, I plan to post a more detailed story about all the ways that I use MuseScore in my daily life as a full time professional musician (pianist / composer / educator). Meanwhile, I'll just share one current project I am very excited by.
A local jazz club where I play from time to time contacted me a week or so ago and asked if I could put something together for a performance next month. My regular quartet was not available for that night, nor were the other musicians I would have felt most comfortable going in with on relatively short notice. So a few days ago I decided, kind of on a whim, to go in with a string quartet.
This was a bit of a stretch because until yesterday, I had only written one piece specifically for string quartet - plus voice, actually. But I have a number of other pieces that I thought I could adapt for this occasion - either to be played by the string quartet alone or with piano or with voice or with both. So I am now frantically re-arranging pieces that I had originally conceived as solo piano pieces or works for larger ensembles. Many of these pieces had originally been written in Finale, but with MusicXML import working well in 1.2, I am finding it very easy to take music I had composed years ago and re-work it for string quartet. And I am now so much more comfortable with MuseScore than with Finale, that even though I lose a little time on the conversion and subsequent cleanup, I still end up ahead in the long run.
Over the course of the next few weeks, I plan to crank out an hours' worth of music for this concert. Actually, it will be two shows, so technically I need two hours of music, but I'll also do a few solo piano versions of some of my existing compositions, and there is no reason I can't repeat some of the string pieces between the two shows.
In reply to There was actually a sort of by Marc Sabatella
You can find that discussion here:-
http://musescore.org/en/node/15593