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

Tantacrul

465K subscribers • 9 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Tantacrul, UX Lead for MuseScore

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

813K views3 years ago4 recommendations

Software designTools and practiceSoftware architectureOpen sourceDesign patterns

Tantacrul walks through the technical and design challenges of overhauling the massive legacy codebase of the open-source MuseScore music notation app.

MuseScore 4 is a complex music composition app for Mac, PC and Linux. Its predecessor (V3) was enormous and incredibly hard to overhaul. In this video, I take you through that process: how we built the team; how we made design decisions and how we improved its playback & engraving quality. Come experience the pain with me! --- Please consider supporting me on Patreon patreon.com/Tantacrul Twitter twitter.com/tantacrul Discord t.co/a3oYi1Rbnc?amp=1 --- Download MuseScore 4 here musescore.org Detailed post about our engraving improvements musescore.org/en/node/330793 --- Subtitles by Pentameron --- Introduction Background behind MuseScore & our challenges Technical & design challenges The re-design process Overhauling playback Overhauling engraving The final mad dash... Why open source matters

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended for its insightful and entertaining look into UX design, legacy software overhauls, and open-source product management.

l__lon Hacker News • Recommends

On “MuseScore 4.1 is now available”

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: link to this 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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btownon Hacker News • Recommends

On “In praise of MIDI, tech’s hidden gift to humanity”

The recent video on MuseScore 4 has a fascinating (though simplified) perspective on how limiting MIDI is: link to this video MIDI's issues in a notation context are twofold: non-standardization of controls for e.g. choosing articulations for string instruments, and an inability to communicate future information if known to the MIDI producer - say, for instance, knowledge that this Note On event is the beginning of a phrase that will last for 2 measures, as known to notation software. There's a real way in which MIDI solved for communicating trigger events over the wire, but was not extensible enough to allow for further backwards-compatible standardization that would let it communicate music over the…
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amiga386on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Printing Music with CSS Grid”

…bject 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 link to this video 2 link 3 link…
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asddubson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Printing Music with CSS Grid”

Maybe the segment on engraving of Tantacruls Musescore 4 video is a good explanation of some of the things involved: link to this 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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bsderon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Debian KDE: Right Linux distribution for professional digital painting in 2024”

> Why do we get the free magic of people making great backward compatible code with other projects and so painfully not with this one? And I explained what the difference is. These projects are old and difficult . Most open source projects are neither. There are very similar problems with open source domain-specific tools, for example (Musescore, GIMP, FreeCAD, KiCad before CERN decided to fund it, etc.). Musescore has a nice video about how hard fixing it was and how hard it was to get to Version 3 and then trying to get it to Version 4 and how lucky they sometimes had to get: link to this video
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rdedevon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Nothing works and everyone is euphoric”

…each other My anecdote for this is the the recentish redesign of Musescore. Tantacrul, the ux designer/product manager for Musescore has an hour long video on how he redesigned the interface and UX of the software. He is also a musician so you can call him a power users if you want but that was not the users he had in mind when redesigning the UX link to this video…
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