Why is it so hard to record into Musescore?

• Feb 18, 2023 - 11:52

I am new to Musescore but I've been using DAW's for over 25 years. I thought since Musescore's been around for a while it would be fairly straightforward to plug in my MIDI keyboard, set the tempo, press record and start playing in real time to record a piece of music. Not a chance! Why is it so hard??
1) First of all the tempo value is not editable but set at 120bpm. When I searched up about it, the documentation says to go into preferences and choose a duration for your notes?!! Since when have people set their tempo using milliseconds instead of bpm? Besides, tempo is not about the duration of notes but the speed of the chosen note (usually quarter note) per minute, and the duration of a 1/32th note is obviously much shorter than a 1/4 note. The other place the documentation said to go is the tempo palette - but why is there only one number (80 bpm) there? I was expecting an editable tempo and a note resolution. that, along with time signature, should be enough to get started.
2) Anyway, as 80bpm just happened to be about the right tempo for me (by some fluke) I set it at that and chose realtime (automatic) mode expecting that recording would start after pressing the play button and it would scroll at a regular pace of 80bpm along the staff, putting the notes in as I played them, but no - for some reason the metronome click randomly fires off every time I play a note, and in a very jerky fashion and putting countless notes into the same bar instead of moving on to the next bar. What on earth is going on?
3) Apart from the weirdness mentioned above, all the notes played by both hands end up on the treble clef - what is this about? even the lowest note on the piano is on treble clef. Surely it should default to notes below Middle C being put on the bass clef unless specified otherwise?
Hope someone can provide some answers for me, otherwise this software is totally useless for me, I may as well just record into piano roll and translate some other way.


Comments

Hi there,
there's one point I might be able to help you with:
When you choose a tempo from the Tempo palette it will always be @80.
But right-clicking it on your sheet you can enter a tempo of your choice (instead the 80) and you score will be played at that tempo.

Sounds like maybe you might want to spend some time in the manual. Notation software doesn't work like a DAW. Even in Sibelius it is tricky to do what you want.

Unfortunately MU still has no real real-time record mode.
The only solid input modes are step- and mouse input.
MU4 didn't focus on how to input notes but rather on how to play them back...

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