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An interesting review, and almost a beginner's tutorial.



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very good.

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Interesting. I've been using MuseScore for a fair time, so know the shortcuts I use regularly and the odd quirks that I personally find.
It was frustrating watching him try to change the tempo as my immediate reaction was to check if it was still in note-entry mode ... it was. Click the icon top left or hit escape. I did wonder that he didn't set the tempo during the initial score setup ... he did most else, but skipped that.

Watching someone who didn't use the manual but brought knowledge and methods from elsewhere made for some discoveries for me ... I've always selected the note (or bar for some) and clicked the icon from the pallet ... I hadn't tried drag and drop to the note. Doh! However my way does allow me to select multiple notes and double-click the item to apply it to all.

He appears to have no discovered the rest is a note 0 (zero) or that one can enter notes by typing their letter. Probably he also hasn't yet discovered that Ctrl-UpArrow and Ctrl-DownArrow shift the note just entered by octaves. Just those few things make like much easier. I hate having to use the mouse too much ... I have some RSI issues as a consequence of doing that in the past.


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In every notation program I have used, you aren’t really productive until you learn the keyboard shortcuts.

The notation software I use now, Notion 6, has a philosophy of not wanting anything to delay starting right in entering music. I like MuseScore’s approach of entering settings in the beginning.

Finale itself recommends converting to Dorico. I haven’t yet had the time to master it but the printouts look great. Interestingly, MuseScore 4 made some real headway with this and looks great printed.


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Is MUSESCORE really the future of music notation?

Maybe but not yet by a long shot.

MuseScore 4 is no longer horrible but it's still not very good. MuseScore 5 is supposed to be chock full of AI goodies so that it can compete with the big boys and become the de facto notation app for Hal Leonard, the largest music publisher in the world—and wholly owned by Cyprus based Muse Group, flush with billion$ of cash from Russia based Ultimate Guitar.

We'll see...

Meanwhile, Sibelius and Dorico have attractive cross-grade offers for Finale customers. Dorico's includes an upgrade license to Finale 27 but it's available for current Finale customers. Dorico released a more "Finale friendly" upgrade a couple days ago.

Finale 27 runs on every Mac made between 2012–2025. Although I have licenses for Dorico, MuseScore, Notion 6 and a few other apps, I'm staying with Finale for now. I get a lot of work translating MuseScore into Finale for a few publishing houses.

If it works great over Windows, that's fine but I cannot recommend Notion 6 for Mac users. Too much of it including the playback engine is still 32 bit. Fender told us that Notion 7 was "coming soon", back in November 2021. They could have made Notion 6 64bit in the mean time. I am not holding my breath. My crystal ball predicts that we will never see Notion 7 — I'd be happy to be wrong.

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Mike is more in touch with these developments, but my hope is that development of a Notion 7 (desktop version) might follow now that Studio One Pro 7 has been released. Although the marketing chose to omit mention of it, there were a few improvements to notation in Studio One 7. I haven’t given up hope for Notion 7.

And Encore 6 suddenly is back to being possible once again. If all it can do is read my hundreds of old Encore scores and export solid Music XML versions, I’ll be happy. Then I can compare the printouts from Dorico and MuseScore’s latest versions. While Notion 6 is my day-to-day workhorse, it was never positioned to make beautifully engraved printouts. If it ever could do that, in conjunction with the free tablet version, that could be outstanding.


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Originally Posted by Mike Halloran
If it works great over Windows, that's fine but I cannot recommend Notion 6 for Mac users. Too much of it including the playback engine is still 32 bit. Fender told us that Notion 7 was "coming soon", back in November 2021. They could have made Notion 6 64bit in the mean time. I am not holding my breath. My crystal ball predicts that we will never see Notion 7 — I'd be happy to be wrong.
I'm in the process of moving all my software over to a new computer, so I've been assembling a long list of how to reinstall my many programs and sound libraries.

By coincidence, I was just getting around to Notion. I'm running Notion 4, and even for $50 don't see a compelling reason to upgrade to Notion 6.

One of the main reasons I was interested in Notion was that it integrated with existing libraries, like Garritan Personal Orchestra. That was back in the days where I had close to no spare money, and I leveraged the purchase of some other music notation program I'd gotten cheap from an auction site into a Notion crossgrade.

But I never found the built-in sounds that great, and Notion 4 seemed to work less well with third party libraries. The focus seems to instead be on integration with Studio One and nothing else.

It looks like I can't even buy the libraries that work with Notion without also getting a Studio One subscription. I tried to double-check that, but after ten minutes, I can't even find the Notion Expansion Sounds on their site again.

I'd be happy to upgrade if there were a reason for paying for a Notion upgrade, but as it is, I'll keep using Notion for the ease of use, but probably move on to Muse Score, which has much better built-in sounds.


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Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?
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But I never found the built-in sounds that great, and Notion 4 seemed to work less well with third party libraries.

That's exactly where Notion 6 for Mac falls down on the job. It cannot work with 64 bit only 3rd party libraries. More and more are this way 32/64 bit is becoming a thing of the past. That Fender never fixed this is the reason for my pessimism.

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And Encore 6 suddenly is back to being possible once again. If all it can do is read my hundreds of old Encore scores and export solid Music XML versions, I’ll be happy.
Yes, me too. I decided not to wait, however.

I have found PDFtoMusic Pro to be surprisingly good with Encore pdf files. Encore 5's MusicXML cannot handle Lyrics, Expressions and most Text. That information is contained in the fonts and PDFtoMusic Pro can export it as MusicXML 3.0. It gets some things wrong, especially if an expression is too close to a text but it is far more accurate with Encore than any of the scan software I've used (PDFtoMusic Pro cannot scan).

It's available for Mac/Win/LINUX and will run in demo mode without restriction except one: It will only export the first page without a license. I know people who use their PDF engines to export single pages rather than pay the $199. I paid the two bills.

There is a non Pro version that does not export MusicXML but Encore already exports MIDI so I have no use for it.


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