Musescore 4 Multiple Tabs

It's certainly not a show-stopper for me, just less convenient to not have all open scores accessible from a tabbed interface.

Maintaining separate audio states for each score should be relatively straightforward (not saying it's trivial though, depending on how modularized the code is for access to the global audio state) using a shared block heap memory holding score-level state that the threads for a given score all access. Given that the playback engine is currently multi-threaded, there must be some synchronization in place to access the shared process global memory for state so replacing with synchronized access to a shared block of heap memory might not be out of reach.

I guess I'm stupid but I spent 45 valuable minutes and I can't get it to work. Ridiculous. They must have 50 versions posted in the normal manner but this one you have to jump through hoops.

Autosave is something to do in addition to save manually. No way does manual saving prevent the need for disaster recovery autosave.

That's a good question, but I think you probably underestimate the value of having different instruments loaded for different scores. After all, you might have a piano score in one window, an orchestra in another, choral music in another, etc. But indeed, it would be great to find a solution,. So far, people have tried but not succeeded. if you're saying you have expertise in this area and are volunteering your service to help in the spirit of open source cooperation, great, I'm sure the team would welcome your contributions!

If you have a solution in mind, I'm sure the development team would welcome your PR that solves it!

But for the record, no, using a "normal interface" for Msue Sounds would not have changed anything about this. The only thing it would have accomplished is rendering Muse Sounds much less realistic. The reason MIDI wasn't chosen is that it is far too limiting, which is why soundfonts can never sound as as good as Muse Sounds and why VST's can come close only through the use of hacks like keyswitches but even then fall short of the capabilities of Muse Sounds.

The interface is not intended to create a lock, BTW - it's going to be published soon as open source, so anyone can use the same interface.

I would never do that in any real world situation. I just did it to see what would happen. And I only did it with 12 scores because that is my full MS4 folder. It maxed my CPU, but I still had ram. This computer is about 8 years old, and doesn't meet MS4 specs. Dual core i5. 8GB ram. 1TB SSD. Oh, and an old Diamond Sound Tube as a usb audio interface. Cost about $20 back in the day. Playback of loud full orchestra scores is fine.

Tested on a dual Xeon E5-1620 @3.60GHz with 16GB RAM, OS: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS, Arch.: x86_64, MuseScore version (64-bit): 4.0.0-223472159, revision: 5485621

The basic program takes about 300MB RAM and each score (even if it is empty) about 200 to 300 MB. No problem if you have enough RAM but this is way more than MS3 used and, for some people, will lead to swap file usage which will really slow things down.

Fortunately, you can buy some seriously powerful ex-corporate PCs on eBay (I am replacing my current system which is 10 years old with a 4 year old machine because the old one has a physical problem with the ethernet circuitry). Or, depending upon your machine, you might see a benefit from adding some RAM (and that might help in other programs, too).

And going to the taskbar icon only shows you MS instances. But I get that it could be a hassle for people how have many things in the taskbar. I have file explorer and control panel only. Plus whatever software I am using at the time.

I'm not defending anything. Just making observations. I hear (as in listening) all kinds of statements about the lack of tabs being bad. I never used tabs in MS3, so it makes no difference to me. But I would never make that decision for you. Bad for the way you work? Sure. Bad in general? Not so sure. You think the developers don't know how important tabs are? There may well be perfectly good reasons why there are no tabs. They may well come back. We may never see them again. Who knows.

"the software needs to work as expected". So it doesn't work as you expect it to work. That makes it a bad program. Yes I know lots of people use tabs. I am especially impressed with the organist that has 130 tabs open at once. But he doesn't really need MS4 for that.

Everyone uses the program differently. For me there are many,many things far more important that, in my opinion that need to be fixed first. But I forgot. You've decided we're done.

No one has called anyone stupid. But you have called me "silly", which is an uncalled for personal attack that I will choose to ignore.

Just, as with anything where personal preference comes into it, there are some who prefer tabs over windows. But of course, there are also tons of people who prefer windows over tabs. If a way can be found to please both sets of users without re-introudcing the very serious playback limitations that plagued all previous versions of MuseScore, then I'm sure someone will implement it. Since MsueScore is open source,e anyone who is sufficiently expert on the technical issues involved is welcome to try to find a solution that so far has eluded the rest of us.

But - Mac is indeed a special case. There is a very serious known lijmtiation in that operating system where the multiple instance approach doesn't work as well as it does on Windows and Linux, because macOS has decided not to support this for some reason. So specific workarounds to problem with macOS are being investigated as well. But the person I was responding to is not on macOS - they are on Linux, which supports these multiple instances beautifully, as does Windows.

I'm no macOS expert, but the clicking I was referring to wasn't on the window itself, but on the thumbnail display shown by Alt-Tab (or whatever the macOS equivalent is). From what I understand, one of the limitations of macOS here is that those thumbnails don't display the name of the score, which is indeed unfortunately and I do hope someone was reported this issue to Apple. But for Windows and Linux, it is quite simple to click the name of the score you want to open. You can also do this directly from the taskbar icon. It's really quite convenient on Windows and Linux, so it's extremely unfortunately that Apple is making it more difficult for the developers to provide an equally good experience on macOS. But they keep trying to find ways.

I only need one click or keypress to see the list of my open scores in MU4 as well. It's literally the exact same number of keypresses or clicks either way. If anyone is still having trouble seeing how to do this, that's fine, just ask and we're always happy to help.

While there is currently no way to organize your open windows built into MuseScore Studio, most OS's and or desktop environments / window managers provide such mechanisms, so it really doesn't seem that necessary for MuseScore to implement a competing one of its own. But if was enough interest in such a thing, it would be perfectly possible to build it on top of a multi-window model. And arguably better. In MU3, I often had more tabs open than would fit across the window, so I was constantly scrolling through them desperately trying to find the right now. Clicking the taskbar icon in MU4 is a huge improvement in that respect even if they aren't ordered in any meaningful way.

It is true that if you've most recently been working on all five of those open scores and have visited those windows more recently than Firebox, it will take one (not five unless your window manager is poorly configured) click or keypress to return to Firebox via Alt+Tab. But if you're literally working all five of those windows that often, then switching out of that and going back to Firefox is not likely to be something you are doing more than once an hour or so. And still only one click to use your taskbar or whatever your window manager calls it.

So, yes, there are absolutely tradeoffs here - certainly use cases where multiple windows saves a click others where tab does, but overall, it's essentially a wash. And even if a statistical analysis proves there is addition click er hour or whatever, that's still a microscopically minuscule price to pay for the absolutely mind-blowingly great advances made possible in return.

Patronising? I just responded to your claim about the hand having to leave the mouse.

Wow, I didn’t realize macOS didn’t show document names - that’s crazy! Hopefully someone has complained to Apple.

As for what you think is the case abint the code and architecture, as I said, if you’ve studied it and think you’ve found a solution the developers all missed, they’d love to hear about it! but as it is, I see no reason to assume it is other than what they have all concluded.

Yes, Chrome is probably not the best example but existing DAWs that do handle VSTs, audio input and output, and provide a tabbed interface for multiple projects is a perfect example. And, also yes, I really do appreciate the new capabilities of MS4!

I really wish I had the bandwidth to dig into the new sound engine code (if it's even all viewable up on git, that is). Because my sneaking suspicion is that it must be using process level global variables for its operation which is why each score needs a separate process. Encapsulating those into thread local storage instead is a doable thing, the scope of which depends on how modular the access to those variables is to begin with.