A few suggestions for easier orchestral writing, film scoring, and overall ease of use

• Dec 9, 2020 - 20:25

So, I've been using Musescore since Musescore 1 in mid 2014, and I personally think that for just writing in music it easily beats Sibelius, Finale, and Dorico, and will be even with them for playback in Musescore 4, but there are a few small things that could make it immensely better.
The first one is Jeetee's amazing plugin for tempo changes being included by default, in a much more accessible way, similar to the way crescendos and diminuendos currently work, being added from palettes and edited in the Inspector. That would make it not only faster to use, but also easier to access for new users.
My second suggestion is differently colored notes for different orchestral sections during playback rather than just blue for the whole orchestra during playback, e.g. woodwinds in green, brass in red, percussion in yellow, and strings in blue. That way it's easier to just see what section is playing just by glancing at the score during playback. It could also be a lot nicer for uploading scores to musescore.com or youtube.
Third is an integrated video player in Musescore, accessible through the sequencer view in Musescore 4, that acts as either a docked window or a floating window, like how the Play Panel, inspector, etc. work in Musescore currently. This would make it way easier to time a score to the video, rather than having to fiddle around with an external video player and painstakingly making it sync up.
My fourth idea is the ability to drag items from palettes into the Note Input toolbar, such as the most commonly used time signatures, brackets for accidentals, tremelos, etc. That way note input could be a lot more efficient.

I feel like all of these, although none are absolutely massive, could really make Musescore a lot more efficient to use, and could help a lot with just the overall UX of the application.


Comments

Thanks for the suggestions!

A couple of things that may help meanwhile:

  • note color can already be customize easily, just select the contents of the staves you want to color (e.g. click first note, Ctrl+Shift+End to select the full staff, click Notes in the Inspector, then change the color. Unlike the tempo changes which I agree is a fundamental feature that the program should support directly, this is more esoteric - you might literally be the only person to ever request exactly this. But if a few others would also find it useful, this does seem like a possibly useful plugin. Probably the existing colornotes plugin could be easily adapted to do this instead of coloring by pitch.

While you can't add palette items to the toolbar, note you can customize the toolbar to some extent using View / Toolbars / Customize Toolbars. You can also customize the palettes by simply dragging things around, so you you can add a new palette for your most-used symbols. ALso someday we hope to support keyboard shortcuts for all palette elements, which will really make things more efficient.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I had no idea about the note color one, thank you! I'm aware of the toolbar customization, and my palettes are already very customized, it would just be great to be able to sort of make it so that the toolbar is the most common elements and palettes are the rest, but it's by no means a necessity. Keyboard shortcuts for all palette elements sounds absolutely amazing though, that's gonna be amazing. On that note, a good way to edit time signatures, key signatures etc. would be if you double click (or single click) on them it shows their respective palettes. For instance, clicking on a 4/4 time signature would pop up the time signatures palette right over the score as a dropdown menu.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I just tried the note color thing, and it's not actually what I meant (probably my fault, I could have worded that part better). What I was referring to is playback note color. Right now all the instruments have a blue playback color, unless you set it differently in settings, as opposed to different section playback colors.

Edit: just edited the wording in the original post to reflect my original meaning a bit better, hopefully it makes a bit more sense now

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