My experiences running Musescore 4 for one day
I've recently enjoyed watching Tantacrul's videos explaining issues he has had with various music software. In that vein, here are some issues I ran into my first day using Musescore 4 (I am using Windows 11):
- Download link exists on the webpage for Musescore 4 but not for Musesounds
- Have to install second app - "Muse Hub" in order to download Musesounds. This app is horrible.
Issues with Muse Hub:- App is a tray icon
- App opens a window just above the tray icon that cannot be moved or resized.
- Tray icon panel overlaps app and clicking in the window does not remove the icon panel.
- Tray icon interferes with options for downloading or pausing the download of sounds.
- App window disappears without being closed and icon panel has to be re-opened in order to access it again
- The various squares inside the App, when clicked on, immediately start downloading.
a. No warning
b. No indication of where the files are being saved
c. No indication of how large the files are
d. No download meter
e. No ability to limit download speed
f. No ability to choose a different download location - There is on option in the App that downloads all the MuseSounds as a single link. However,
this is in the "Featured" section, which is a slider. This slider cannot be manually advanced, and
if it moves away from this option, you have to wait for it to come back in order to make use of this option. - There is an option in the settings that allows you to change the download location. However,
this option does not work as expected when a download is currently in progress. I expect it to
move all of its already downloaded files into the new location and delete them from the old location
(freeing up the space), but it does not do this. - Uninstalling MuseHub also does not delete the downloaded files. They sit on your hard drive taking up space.
- To get MuseHub to actually download the files into a different location, I had to:
a. Stop all the downloads.
b. Uninstall MuseHub
c. Delete the MuseHub download directory manually.
d. Reinstall MuseHub
e. Before clicking on any boxes, go to the settings and change the download directory.
f. Download the files
g. Wait for all files to download and then check the download directory to see how big it is, since this is
the only way to find this information (It's 13.5 gigabytes).
More issues with MuseScore 4:
3. Musescore 4 starts up with a dark theme, but the piece of "paper" is pure white. The contrast is burning
my eyes!
There is an option to change the "paper". This is great!
4. The playback controls can be pulled down as a floating window, in which case they give you more options.
Unfortunately, these options do not work as expected.
a. There is a bar that shows the player's progress. Hitting the "rewind" bar does not reset the progress bar
until after you hit "play". I think "rewind" should move the progress bar, so you can tell that it did
something, and so that you know from where "play" will start.
b. Other software uses a double-click to reset a slider to default position. I think this would be useful for the
Tempo slider, to bring it back to 100%.
5. If you select a VST as the playback device, hitting stop does not send note-offs to the VST. Any notes that
were on when you hit stop will stay on, even if you rewind and start over.
6. By default, right-click on the page will delete notes. I am used to right click deselecting the tool I am using.
7. Some tools cannot be deselected once they are selected.
a. When you open MuseScore 4, none of the options on the ribbon are selected. Selecting a note turns on the
pencil, the note, and the note with a 1 next to it. Clicking on the pencil highlights the rest instead. There
doesn't appear to be any way to go back to the state of "everything is deselected". Either the app should
start with these three options already selected, or there should be a way to turn everything off.
b. I want a "deselect all tools" button.
8. The mixer doesn't scale well on high-dpi screens. (I have a 4k screen)
Comments
Sorry to reply to my own post, but five more minutes of playing with MuseScore 4 brought up some more issues:
1. Selecting the first note or rest in the first measure and then selecting a time signature applies the time signature to that clef only, even on a grand staff.
2. File->New opens a second instance of MuseScore instead of closing the open document and starting a new one in the same window, as expected.
3. Selecting the time signature and then choosing a key signature does nothing instead of changing the key signature, as expected.