Music Software & Interface Design: MuseScore

This is a UX & UI design review of the music notation software: MuseScore, which has become increasingly popular over the last few years. In this video I look at three things: the visual appeal of its UI design, the usability of its navigation and how it compares to Avid’s Sibelius when it comes to notation finesse. Since the company was bought by Ultimate Guitar in 2018, it’s beginning to look like a serious competitor, especially since it’s open source and free to use. Download it now and see for yourself!

This review focuses solely on the recently released MuseScore 3, rather than MuseScore 2, which is no longer being actively developed.

This is the second part of my notation software comparison series. The next application in line for review will be either Notion, Dorico or Finale. I’ll let circumstance dictate which! Sibelius get a few mentions in this video. I couldn't not talk about them!

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Please support me on Patreon. It's the only way I can finance making these videos with any degree of stability.
  / tantacrul  

Some notes on this video:

Mania (Greek goddess of insanity) and Oizys (Greek goddess of depression and anxiety) are depicted here as creepy looking statues. Since neither of these gods are particularly well known, it was extremely difficult to find sculptures of either of them, so I used images of unusual, weather beaten statues found in Vienna. I’m pretty sure the one on the right is a depiction of Mary. The other… I’m not certain.

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Attributions:

The horror music used during ‘those’ Shostakovich scenes were created by GowlerMusic:
https://www.youtube.com/redirect?q=ht...

Thanks to Daniel Ray at MuseScore for all his tireless help answering questions never once asking me to 'be nice'!

Thanks to Jonathan Lee (Pentameron) for providing much better subtitles than mine. Really appreciate the work and I've learned a lot about how to do it properly. (You'd think it's easy)
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LINKS

Download MuseScore 3
https://musescore.org/en/download


Design and Open Source
https://benwerd.com/2011/06/27/open-s...


Mental models:
https://uxdesign.cc/making-better-des...