General Disappointment with Version 4

• Aug 15, 2023 - 16:55

HI there - I don't mean to be overly negative but I'm feeling very negative about V4 right now. Many of the things I appreciated about V3 are gone or don't work as well. And now I've converted half of my scores so I have a real mess.
- Can't change overall pitch (e.g. to A=415 or some other A) without the extremely cumbersome solution of adding a DAW.
- Plugins don't work or hardly work. So no support for temperament changes I guess.
- By the time you discover points one and two you've converted your piece and then you can't open in V3 except through the cumbersome method of exporting XML.
- You can't see from the desktop if the file is going to be V3 or V4 compatible - you have to open it in V3, have it fail, then open it in V4, export as XML, open it in V3, fix the stuff that's been lost via conversion... For each V4 file.

I except that this is my own fault - I should have researched V4 before wading in. But I would be interested to know if the development path will eventually bring back these functions - otherwise I think MuseScore and I must part.


Comments

You wrote:
By the time you discover points one and two you've converted your piece and then you can't open in V3 except through the cumbersome method of exporting XML.

There's another way...
Un-zip the MuseScore (.mscz) file using something like 7-Zip (https://www.7-zip.org/) and open the .mscx file found within.
For example, unzipping a MuseScore 4 file named "Rhythm Warmups.mscz" will show:
MS-unzip.png

You also wrote:
But I would be interested to know if the development path will eventually bring back these functions...

Yes, MuseScore 4 is a work in progress. See:
https://musescore.org/en/node/334701

This is a common problem I see in many software forums, not just MuseScore. For a good upgrade protocol, ALWAYS have backups for any file that is being converted to a new version. Store the copy in another folder, and preferably another copy on a different drive if the file is important. Then you can always back out and reinstall the previous software version. Having backups is simpler than unziping and extracting. When I teach computer skills I always tell new people that there are two kinds of computer users. Those who have had a hard drive crash, and those who will.

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