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How We Made MuseScore 4 - Music App Design is Challenging!

Tantacrul · 814.2K views · 2022-12-16 · 46:33

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Overview

Tantacrul walks through how the MuseScore 4 team was built and how design decisions were made for the overhaul of a huge legacy notation app. It covers playback and engraving quality improvements.

On Hacker News

Recommended as a candid, in-depth look at hard UX redesign work and the limits of MIDI for notation.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2022–2026

Topics

UX & UI designMusic theory, synthesis & production
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musescoreux designengravingmidisoftware redesign

What people said

l__l · 2023-07 · Strong recommendation

If anyone is yet to see it, Tantacrul (on youtube) is now deeply involved with MuseScore (UX lead or similar?); he put out an awesome vid on the design of MS4 at the beginning of the year: [VIDEO] His video on how Sibelius' UX is a pile of shit remains one of my favourite vids on yt: [LINK]

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amiga386 · 2024-05 · Recommendation

That's very much it. You could also make an analogy to the arts of typography and typesetting. It's of the same importance to a composer or musician that the notation is legible and beautiful, as it is to a graphic designer or reader that type and layout are legible and beautiful. If the GP is interested in the topic, there are great videos by Tantacrul on his experience redesigning the notation font for MuseScore [0] and his overview of MuseScore 4.0's engraving improvements [1] - in particular this second video, concerning mainly layout, shows just how far this CSS approach would have to go to have a truly legible, reflowable layout in the face of beams/slurs/ties. (I don't want to take away from anyone on the Sibelius team, they're likely even better experts on the subject than Tantacrul is, but as far as I know, they didn't make long-form Youtube videos about the topic! He also likely got the job of leading the MuseScore redesign thanks to his previous videos that critiqued and reimagined the interfaces of music composition software... including older versions of Sibelius [2] and MuseScore [3]) [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]

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asddubs · 2024-05 · Recommendation

Maybe the segment on engraving of Tantacruls Musescore 4 video is a good explanation of some of the things involved: [VIDEO] the whole video is worth watching as well (and there are several videos on the channel focusing on the UI of notation apps, worth watching for anyone who does UI but isn't interested in music production as well)

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Sources

Video by Tantacrul, played through YouTube.

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