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#ux#uidesign#dorico

Music Software & Interface Design: Steinberg's Dorico

Tantacrul

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YouTube
  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Tantacrul, UX designer
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

949K views6 years ago2 recommendations

Software designSimplicity and complexity

Tantacrul analyzes the user interface and user experience design of Steinberg's Dorico music notation software through user testing.

In this video, I break down the UX/UI design of Steinberg’s Dorico - an increasingly popular music notation software that competes with AVID’s Sibelius. To help me look at how the experience has been designed, I test it out on real musicians and documented my own experience trying to compose in it too. Is it seaworthy? Does it float? Well... yes it does... but there be jank in them there waters... --- Jankalog t-shirts available here! bonfire.com/jankalog-concept/ If you’d like to see these videos more regularly, please consider supporting me on Patreon. (Note - there are two exclusive Tantacrul videos available on Patreon that you can’t see anywhere else) patreon.com/Tantacrul Join me on Twitter @Tantacrul See my work on the MuseScore channel youtube.com/MuseScore It’s still early days with MuseScore but big changes are being planned! --- SUBTITLES The amazing subtitles (especially the 'Jank' section) were done by Pentameron: youtube.com/channel/UC9cJLV8SzlNla5MFVY8lSVg --- MUSIC Special thanks to The Bran Flakes for allowing me to use their track ‘Oddio Overplay’ during the ‘Jank it up’ section. Check out their album ‘Bubbles’ here. I’ve loved this for years. youtu.be/Q_r_Edp8PWk Visit the Bran Flakes’ website here: thebranflakes.com/ --- DORICO LINKS How Dorico was made - Daniel Spreadbury’s blog blog.dorico.com/2013/02/musicians-union-meeting-report/ Recent Interview with Daniel Spreadbury icancompose.com/interview-with-dorico-creator-daniel-spreadb… Tutorial for creating contemporary, freely metered music scoringnotes.com/tutorials/creating-freely-metered-music-dor… Rockin’ Music youtube.com/watch?v=eECSX-0fN_U&feature=youtu.be An example of Dorico throwing shade at Sibelius I love the way Daniel refers to Sibelius as ‘Product A’, then mentions how rest placement improvements are their ‘third highest-voted feature request’, followed by a link directly to the Sibelius feedback community. lol. blog.dorico.com/2014/02/development-diary-part-the-fifth/ Avids share price and revenue uk.finance.yahoo.com/quote/AVID/ ycharts.com/companies/AVID/revenues Sibelius moving to the Ukraine globallogic.com/blogs/how-to-build-the-biggest-lab-in-ukrain… Igor Engraver Handbook yumpu.com/en/document/read/22736610/igor-engraver-manual

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an excellent, entertaining, and detailed case study in software UX and UI design.

ohazion Hacker News • Recommends

On “Update on MuseScore 3.6 and 4.0”

For those out of the loop: Tantacrul is a composer who put together some hilariously scathing UI/UX video reviews for some popular composing software tools out there, including MuseScore 1 2 3. The team developing MuseScore then brought him on as head of design. 1 Sibelius: link 2 MuseScore: link 3 Dorico: link to this video

guitarbillon Hacker News • Recommends

On “I’m now in charge of Audacity [video]”

The MuseScore video is part entertainment, part critique. Personally, I don't think it's fair to dismiss it so quickly. He's very knowledgable in the field of music notation software, and is in a smaller niche of having used several of them professionally (most people stick to one or two). In another video on Dorico 0, he did user testing. So he's not just pulling things out his ass. It's easy to hate. MuseScore is better due to his involvement. The FOSS community should be more welcoming to UX devs in general, and especially who have a methodical approach and actually listen. Maybe wait and reserve judgement. 0 link to this video

Nullabillityon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Linux Sucks 2020”

Tantacrul did one on MuseScore0 (a music composing program), and ended up getting hired as their head of design1. 0: link 1: Mentioned in link to this video , but don't have the exact timestamp

jasodeon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius (2018) [video]”

Well, the founders of Sibelius created another music notation software called Dorico1. Is Dorico's UI more consistent? Does it address many of the issues of this video's criticism? Or put another way, does being a green-field software project allow the freedom to create a sane UI? Or did it have to deliberately copy may of Sibelius' faults so migrating users can quickly get up to speed with Dorico? (Analogous to MS Excel copying Lotus 123 buggy leap year of 1900 to be more compatible.) EDIT -- just noticed same uploader also made a 1 hour video about Dorico2 but not sure if answers my questions. 1 link 2 link to this video

lifthrasiiron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Audacity: Actions we propose to take on PR 835”

Tantacrul, the project lead for both MuseScore and Audacity, is a professional UI/UX designer and has once conducted a significant first-time user testing for Dorico 1, so I'm pretty sure that he already knows what you are saying. Given his latest video about Audacity 2 though, I guess that Audacity has a very diverse user base and it might be hard to do the user testing while accounting for that diversity (the article you've linked specifically mention this issue). 1 link to this video 2 link (includes an interview with original Audacity developers)