First Published: 2022 December 17
So I may have completely lost myself and ability to blog these past few weeks, but now seems as good of a time as any to get back into the swing. Musescore 4 recently came out, and it’s an absolutely wild experience.
Musescore1 is one of the two music engraving software2 I use.3 It is Free4, and the latest version completely overhauled most of the UI, which is nice.5 The part that really gets me excited, though, is the difference in how music playback works.
The lead of the project made a long video discussing it, but the summary is basically that there are now sampled sound packs available, and they really bring the quality of the sound so many levels up. I honestly somewhat forgot that not all of the notes were computer generated when I was listening back. It makes it so much more fun to write music when the sounds coming out are nicer.
I said above that I didn’t really get excited about the UI, which is somewhat true. It in many regards is the ideal UI, in that you hardly notice it. I was entering notes generally without issue, and that’s really what software is for.
On a tangent, I told one of my old professors about the new release, and he pointed me to another app which has AI sing vocal words. Now I can finally know what my choral pieces sound like sung!