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#ux #ui #sibelius

Music Software & Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius

465K subscribers • 9 videos on Hallway

Recommended by 8 people: 8 on Hacker News.
A classic. People kept recommending it from 2019 to 2023.
Presented by Tantacrul
An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

1.7M views7 years ago8 recommendations

Software design Design patterns Simplicity and complexity

Tantacrul dissects the user experience and interface design of Avid's Sibelius music notation software, highlighting poor design patterns.

In this video, I take a detailed look at the UX/UI design of Avid's Sibelius - a popular music notation software. Sibelius is the embodiment of what not to do as a user experience designer and this video covers a range of examples of inappropriate design patterns and bad user interface choices. Then I go insane. Support me on Patreon: patreon.com/Tantacrul Twitter: twitter.com/Tantacrul Discord: discord.gg/fRUCjz9 This really is one of the great examples of breaking all user interface design principles and every user experience design principle too. It's like a design bull in a musical china shop. --- 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, wouldn't you?)

Why it's here

8 people recommend this, 1 disputes it

What people say. Highly recommended as an incredibly entertaining and educational critique of bad software user interface design.

sjwrighton Hacker News • 6 years agoRecommends

On “MuseScore 4: Moving from notation software to composition software”

The cheese melts in the microwave; the music melts in Sibelius. Tantacrul’s review of Sibelius’ might be the most entertaining serious critique of a software user interface ever posted to YouTube. link to this video

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wexqon Hacker News • 5 years agoRecommends

On “Audacity Aquired by Muse Group”

OSS needs more UI/UX people, and I think Tantacrul is fantastic for this. His twitter ( link ) and youtube ( link ) are full of interesting tidbits, an you can tell he's passionate about things. Even if you don't do music/notation his video on Sibelius, link to this video , is ridiculously funny, but also on point.

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btownon Hacker News • 5 years agoRecommends

On “‘Jean Sibelius’ Review: An Early Finale”

Since Sibelius and Finale are two industry-leading (and very much competing) music notation software systems, this headline made me do a quadruple-take! link link For those interested in (extremely entertaining) breakdowns of the Sibelius software and other offerings in this space from a UI/UX design perspective, I highly recommend Tantacrul's videos, which propelled him to becoming the head designer for MuseScore and Audacity. IMO, this and his Dorico video are must-watch crash-courses for any developer touching UX design, even outside of music! link to this video

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l__lon Hacker News • 3 years agoRecommends

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 His video on how Sibelius' UX is a pile of shit remains one of my favourite vids on yt: link to this video

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rgoulteron Hacker News • 7 years agoRecommends

On “Whitespace killed an enterprise app”

This entertaining diatribe about Sibelius' difficult to use design mentions poor use of a Ribbon. link to this video

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xmprton Hacker News • 7 years agoRecommends

On “The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)”

The solution isn't to put things in preference windows either because even smart users will find that cumbersome. There's an interesting pair of videos (if you have some time) that goes over the UI of two competing music scoring software and why one is bad and the other good. link to this video link

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TremendousJudgeon Hacker News • 4 years agoRecommends

On “Clairnote: An alternative music notation system”

We are very, very far away from that. To get a feel of what scorewriter software is like nowadays, Tantacrul's videos0 on the subject of UI are very good at showing what the state of the art is. On one of his videos he shows that the best score engraving can only be achieved by using a closed source, now-unsupported command line program from the 80s called Score1 0 link to this video 1 link

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radicalityon Hacker News • 3 years agoRecommends

On “MuseScore 4”

Obligatory funny video review of MuseScore 3 UI: link Same author also has a funny video on the UI of another music notation program, Sibelius: link to this video

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SeanLukeon Hacker News • 6 years agoDisputes

On “Apple unveils biggest update to Logic since the launch of Logic Pro X”

…think Pro Tools is viewed as The Thing That All Studio PHB Managers Purchased At Some Point So It's Reasonable For Studio Techs to Be Trained For. Kind of the "nobody ever got fired for picking IBM" of the music industry. In my opinion, AVID does not have a reputation for making innovative products. See what happened when they acquired Sibelius ( link to this video ). My limited experience with the industry suggests that Ableton, Bitwig, and Logic are the Cool Tools for Producing Music, that Cubase (Steinberg) is particularly popular with composers, that FL Studio is the cool low-cost leader among students, and that Reason is The Outsider. Notice which software is not in this list.…

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ohazion Hacker News • 5 years agoMentions

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 to this video 2 MuseScore: link 3 Dorico: link

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ArchieMacleanon Hacker News • 5 years agoMentions

On “Fuckin' user interface design, I swear”

My favourite example of this is Sibelius. The 'Quit Sibelius' button is precisely where you'd expect to find the 'Next' button. This video shows it at 6:33 link to this video

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robocaton Hacker News • 4 years agoMentions

On “Ask HN: I’d like to hire a personal/executive assistant – any tips or advice?”

> doing things like automating certain workflows where possible, building some custom tools, etc. The goal is to slowly transition to working as a programmer at Steinberg or Ableton or something like that, and then start my own company. I presume you’ve contacted tantacrul1 who is now working2 redesigning Audacity, with a hilarious video on the hellscape of a UI that is Sibelius3. I am guessing becoming a UI designer for a major piece of software is less difficult than becoming a composer? 1 link 2 link 3 link to this video Thank you for your story - it is a good reminder of the risks we face.

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Gansejungeon Hacker News • 3 years agoMentions

On “Unity's oldest community announces dissolution”

I was wondering why the name Avid was familiar but also had a negative connotation in my head, then I remembered it was from a YouTube video 1 about how horrible its interface is. 1. link to this video

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amiga386on Hacker News • 2 years agoMentions

On “Printing Music with CSS Grid”

…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 2 link to this video 3 link…

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wildrhythmson Hacker News • 2 years agoMentions

On “The End of Finale”

Relevant Tantacrul video on the erosion of the Sibelius UI: link to this video I used Sibelius extensively circa version 5, and refused to upgrade for many years. I used it to get through my music minor in college. I still have the installer and a k*ygen on a hard drive somewhere since they stopped selling licenses to it and I lost mine. Still my preferred software, and yes I've tried Musescore. It's not nearly the same. Old software still works.

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zimpenfishon Hacker News • 2 months agoMentions

On “Twenty Years of RISC OS Open”

Obligatory posting of Tantacrul's hilariously vicious kicking of Sibelius0 "This really is one of the great examples of breaking all UI design principles and every UX design principle too. It's like a design bull in a musical china shop." link to this video 0 They may have fixed things in the intervening 8 years, I'm not a composer, I don't know.

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