Midi Out feature advertising

• May 31, 2013 - 10:55
Type
Wording/Translation
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
closed
Project
MuseScore

MuseScore should not advertise the Midi Out feature if it does not support it.

There seems to be a lack of motivation / resources in the developers team to get Midi Out working properly.
Currently it can get very frustrating to get Midi Out working since the software has options for this feature and people (like me) get lured into trying to get it to work. The most astonishing environment is Mac OS where
MuseScore does not seem to support any of the latest OS versions 10.6.x 10.7.x and 10.8.x although theoretically a
Mac has quite good native support for MIDI output.

Most Notation software that I know or have been using in the past sees MIDI output as a standard / must have feature. I am worried that MuseScore is different in this respect but does not say so in its advertising / documentation. This is clearly a bug to be fixed. Make up your mind whether you fix your advertising/documentation or the software. I consider the current state inacceptable.

Comments

• May 31, 2013 - 12:06

http://musescore.org/node/3267
is one of the first post mentioning the feature - it states it does work with Windows (experimentally) but does not state explicitly that it might not work with Mac OS X

http://musescore.org/en/node/21159
shows "use JACK Midi Output" as a possible I/O configuration
this options seems to have no effect on Mac OS X >= 10.6

The dependency on JACK seems to be at the core of the issue:
http://www.jackosx.com/
states problems with latest MAC OS X Versions from 10.7 - unfortunately in my environment even a 10.6.8 version does not
work properly. It would be good to know what the latest working combination was (if there ever was one - but I think there was some posting here mentioning that a 10.5.x environment was successfully used by someone)

Reply

• May 31, 2013 - 17:55

Thanks for pointing to the articles. I'm not familiar enough with Jack, so let's see what the experts can tell us about Jack and Mac OS X.

As for the false advertising claim:

http://musescore.org/node/3267
First sentence states: "Ever wondered how to playback your MuseScore score on your keyboard? Now you can with Jack and MuseScore 0.9.6 for Windows". > It explicitly states the instructions are for Windows and it doesn't say a word about Mac.

http://musescore.org/en/node/21159
In the third intro paragraph: "The instructions are for Ubuntu GNU/Linux systems, but may be useful to those running MuseScore under Windows or Mac OSX." > "May be useful" is perhaps ambiguous, but the instructions are for Ubuntu.

So I don't think it's right to claim false advertising.

If for instance it would be stated in the tour that MuseScore offers MIDI out, then I would have acknowledged your statement.

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