# Musescore Beta & Muse Sounds - It's Here!



## soundofmaw (Oct 22, 2022)

After a fairly heart-stopping introduction (read the page and you’ll understand what I mean), it is now available for download…









MuseScore 4 Update: About the Beta Release...


Hey everyone, It is with great regret and sadness that I deliver this announcement today: there will be no beta. Why has this happened? The simple answer is:…




musescore.org





Happy beta testing!


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## Markrs (Oct 22, 2022)

Very exciting news, I will be trying this out today!


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## PhaseLock (Oct 22, 2022)

Has anyone had luck downloading the sounds? My don't seem to be making any progress; I'm thinking that perhaps the server is overloaded.


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## Jett Hitt (Oct 22, 2022)

PhaseLock said:


> Has anyone had luck downloading the sounds? My don't seem to be making any progress; I'm thinking that perhaps the server is overloaded.


I've been following the progress on Discord, and a number of people have mentioned this. Try quitting and then restarting. I have seen that suggested multiple times.


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## gyprock (Oct 23, 2022)

Jett Hitt said:


> I've been following the progress on Discord, and a number of people have mentioned this. Try quitting and then restarting. I have seen that suggested multiple times.


Where's the Discord server? I tried searching for Musescore within the Discord app but nothing came up.


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## pinki (Oct 23, 2022)

Congratulations to the team, amazing work.
Unless Presonus get their act together and bring out Notion 7 before the end of the year, I will go over to Musescore full time. (at the moment I use it for engraving only)


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## wlinart (Oct 23, 2022)

PhaseLock said:


> Has anyone had luck downloading the sounds? My don't seem to be making any progress; I'm thinking that perhaps the server is overloaded.


I had the same problem, restarting the hub helped, and it was installed in less than 2 minutes after that


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## Cdnalsi (Oct 23, 2022)

Still no Apple Silicon native, but now there's a new "hub" app that instals a daemon. Ugh.


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## ZenBYD (Oct 23, 2022)

I normally stay away from beta but couldn't resist this one... wow congrats to the musescore team this is very impressive. I have to say the musesounds are excellent. I guess it is the staffpad engine after all. I downloaded all of them fine. the hub seems nice... better than avid link. I havent explored all the stuff in it yet.

what worries me about the sounds is that the quality is very high but it is apparently all free. there has to be a catch somewhere... also musescore is still clunky and still nowhere near the power of sib or dorico, so yes we now have impressive playback but it is trapped inside musescore. why oh why didn't steinberg or avid buy the staffpad engine? that would have been huge!!!


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## sundrowned (Oct 23, 2022)

ZenBYD said:


> why didn't steinberg or avid buy the staffpad engine?


Or just develop their own. It doesn't seem _that _complicated. It's mainly 'this symbol plays that audio file'.

Anyway congratulations to musescore for pushing this forward. Incredible that it's free.
Though still needs a lot of work and very much still in beta for me.

Looking at the files it does seem to be an adapted version of how staffpad works. Though a bit more locked down. Playback also seems to suffer in the same way staffpad can. Struggles with fast passages, missed notes, timing issues, dynamics issues, noise issues. Also there's a lot of reverb that currently I don't think is controllable.

But I think they'll probably work on those issues more consistently than staffpad. Simply because of how differently the companies are setup, with musescore being open source and having community involvement.

All in all pretty promising.


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## JohnS (Oct 23, 2022)

Anybody aware what is the total download size for MuseSounds?


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## Maarten (Oct 23, 2022)

JohnS said:


> Anybody aware what is the total download size for MuseSounds?


Just under 14 GB


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## JohnS (Oct 23, 2022)

Any chance that MuseSounds would work outside of MuseScore, as a VST plugin to any DAW?
Soundfonts from MuseScore 3.6 could be used in Sforzando and then in DAW.


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## Jett Hitt (Oct 23, 2022)

gyprock said:


> Where's the Discord server? I tried searching for Musescore within the Discord app but nothing came up.


I know very little about Discord, but try this:

http://discord.gg/fRUCjz9

If not, go to Twitter and follow Tantacrul. There is an invite there in his description or "about me" section. (Not sure what Twitter calls this.)


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## ssnowe (Oct 23, 2022)

Looking forward to using this on Linux and leaving the Windows/Apple proprietary locked-in paywalls behind. This could be the Blender3d of the music world.


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## Markrs (Oct 23, 2022)

I assumed they were going to charge for the sounds given they probably have to pay quite a bit too either have them recorded or license the samples used.


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## bitbrain (Oct 23, 2022)

This is very exciting! I downloaded the beta to my laptop and tried to play back a few old scores, and the audio is distorting quite a bit. Anyone know what the minimum requirements are for the beta? Is this a bug with the software or an issue with my laptop not being up for the task? My laptop has an i3 3.0 GHz and 8 GB ram.

Regardless, I am still pretty excited to try this out. I'll give it a go on my desktop later.


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## sundrowned (Oct 23, 2022)

bitbrain said:


> This is very exciting! I downloaded the beta to my laptop and tried to play back a few old scores, and the audio is distorting quite a bit. Anyone know what the minimum requirements are for the beta? Is this a bug with the software or an issue with my laptop not being up for the task? My laptop has an i3 3.0 GHz and 8 GB ram.
> 
> Regardless, I am still pretty excited to try this out. I'll give it a go on my desktop later.


Are you on windows? I had the same (on two different machines) and had to put the buffer on high in the musescore settings.


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## Jett Hitt (Oct 23, 2022)

I saw somewhere that they recommended 2048.


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## Snarf (Oct 23, 2022)

For now, they recommend high buffers and working from new scores instead of importing old ones. You should report further issues here: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues


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## wcreed51 (Oct 25, 2022)

I downloaded the Woodwinds, but don't see them available in the mixer. Is there a different place to select them?


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## Jett Hitt (Oct 25, 2022)

wcreed51 said:


> I downloaded the Woodwinds, but don't see them available in the mixer. Is there a different place to select them?


I listed the discord channel earlier in this thread. You will find all of the workarounds there. There is endless chatter about these sorts of problems.


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## wcreed51 (Oct 25, 2022)

Thanks Jeff! Looks like I could spend a week trying to find info you there.

I uninstalled Muse 3 and 4 Alpha, then downloaded again from the Hub, but not sure I got anything different than I had before. The About show 4.0, with an update option to update to 4.28, just as I had before


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## Jett Hitt (Oct 25, 2022)

wcreed51 said:


> Thanks Jeff! Looks like I could spend a week trying to find info you there.
> 
> I uninstalled Muse 3 and 4 Alpha, then downloaded again from the Hub, but not sure I got anything different than I had before. The About show 4.0, with an update option to 4.28, just as I had before


It is a river of crap to wade through, no doubt, but it is the only place I know where answers are being provided. You can probably just post a question in general, and maybe someone will respond. Oddly, it doesn't seem to have a search function.

For what it is worth, the answer to many problems has been quit and restart. (Disclaimer: I am following this because I am very interested, but I haven't downloaded the beta because, well, it's a beta.)


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## Electric Lion (Oct 27, 2022)

So I tried downloading the hub this morning and apparently it only works on mac OS 11? Is that the case? Is there any way for those of us still on 10 to use musescore 4?


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## muziksculp (Oct 27, 2022)

Anyone know if the official release version of Mscore 4 is expected to be released this year ?


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## VSTHero (Oct 27, 2022)

It sounded like it on the discord but things change so quickly. They are setting it up so the nightlies will be able to use Muse Sounds - so we'll be able to download successively improved versions soon which is nice, and of course, it all goes faster if were using it and reporting bugs on the GitHub.


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## VSTHero (Oct 27, 2022)

One thing I found for Mac Users, after you install Muse Hub, make sure to remove the mounted installation drive on your desktop or it may interfere with running Muse Hub and downloading the libraries (I'm not sure if they have fixed this yet).


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## Tacet (Oct 27, 2022)

Does anyone know if solo strings are included in Muse Sounds at this stage?
Or is it just the orchestra string section?


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## VSTHero (Oct 27, 2022)

Violin, viola, and cello have solo versions so far


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## VSTHero (Oct 27, 2022)

No bass yet. And you can install on an external SSD, just make sure to go to the Muse Hub settings before starting the download.


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## Tacet (Oct 27, 2022)

VSTHero said:


> Violin, viola, and cello have solo versions so far


Great, thanks.
How do you rate them?
At the very least, I'd expect them to be better than MS 3.6, but that's a fairly low bar.
Your thoughts?


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## VSTHero (Oct 27, 2022)

Way, way beyond - they sound like Staff Pad libraries - here's a very poorly arranged example - I didn't use any articulations or dynamics, just a voice leading exercise.


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## VSTHero (Oct 27, 2022)

Here's some winds and strings sections with same harmony. But I'm sure in the coming weeks much better examples will be showing up on YouTube. I'd like to hear a string quartet with all the proper balancing and articulations; but really a wonderful library for notation focused users, and at no cost. I'm curious to see how well it balances compared to Noteperformer in terms of realism and checking ones writing.


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## muziksculp (Oct 27, 2022)

VSTHero said:


> Way, way beyond - they sound like Staff Pad libraries - here's a very poorly arranged example - I didn't use any articulations or dynamics, just a voice leading exercise.


Sounds pretty good, given no artic. or dynamics used. 

I'm not going to bother with installing the beta version. I will wait for the official release, whenever it is ready. 

Thanks.


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## Tacet (Oct 27, 2022)

VSTHero said:


> Way, way beyond - they sound like Staff Pad libraries - here's a very poorly arranged example - I didn't use any articulations or dynamics, just a voice leading exercise.


Well, that's so much better than the previous soundfonts. 

Thanks for the example in real time, much appreciated.


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## wcreed51 (Oct 28, 2022)

Nightlies use MuseSounds now...


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## OstrovskyiComposer (Nov 24, 2022)

Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by both the sounds and the playback engine. I downloaded the xml score of "Faunе" by Debussy on MuseScore, (in which I did not edit anything) ran it in different notation editors with the participation of NotePerformer. The result is that NotePerformer performs significantly worse than this beta version. Moreover, the StaffPad with the Berlin libraries turned out to be surprisingly the loser, both the strings and the StaffPad itself, which reacted too sharply to the dynamics, could not cope. Most likely, this is due to the fact that third-party libraries for StaffPad, which often lose to its native libraries (not in sound, of course). This is most likely the story here - Muse Sounds turn out to be maximally integrated with articulations in MuseScore. By the way, the xml file (Debussy) itself is quite problematic, it has, to put it mildly, amateurish dynamics and nuances, and there are problems with some recording of parts, especially harps. However, the magic of the beta version of MuseScore 4 with its Muse Sounds did it.
Thank you beta developers, you are doing wonders!


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Nov 24, 2022)

VSTHero said:


> Way, way beyond - they sound like Staff Pad libraries - here's a very poorly arranged example - I didn't use any articulations or dynamics, just a voice leading exercise.


That sounds good!


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## Henrik B. Jensen (Nov 24, 2022)

I'm amazed by the quality of the playback here.


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## marius_dm (Nov 24, 2022)

Yup, for sure. Honestly, this sounds better than most "mockups" that use thousands of dollars of libraries unless you really know what you are doing. And this requires way less fiddling for good playback, or any fiddling at all.


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## VSTHero (Nov 24, 2022)

I'm excited to see how it develops - they are consistently working on updates currently. Meanwhile I've been setting up my own Cinematic Studios playback in Dorico - it'll be interesting to compare MuseSounds, my custom CS playback (fairly modest compared to folks layering many libraries), and NotePerformer 4 when it arrives next year.


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## Markrs (Nov 24, 2022)

Agree with some other on here that I feel that MuseScore playback seems to be a better job that StaffPad with 3rd party libraries.


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## Jett Hitt (Nov 24, 2022)




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