that I decided I should probably check it out and in this video I'm going to
give five reasons why Musescore is winning at the music notation game.
So the first and probably biggest reason is that Musescore is free.
Dorico is $560 if you're not coming from an upgrade or a cross grade.
Sibelius is $30 a month, which feels just kind of
crazy to me and $600 if you just wanna pay for it outright.
They do have this option that says you pay $600 and you get this annual perpetual license
that you can renew which, what does that mean?
Does that mean you actually are still subscribing and you're still paying?
Either way they're really expensive, it's a big investment.
So Musescore being free makes it a pretty obvious choice for where
you would want to start if you're just getting into the notation game
or if you're due for an upgrade and you're not sure you want to shell it out.
The second thing that follows from that price tag is that it's open source.
So there's a few things that are good about this.
One is that you can trust that the software is going to be around for a while.
If Avid or Steinberg were to go out of business for some reason
it would probably be really hard to get a hold of their software.
But because the code for Musescore is available for free on the internet people are still
going to be able to access it, keep it up to date with operating system improvements, and basically
just keep it alive and sustained as long as there are people who are interested in using it.
Another nice thing about it being open source is that it's pretty agile.
So when people are making requests, people are saying "Hey we need to see such and such
feature," it can actually be implemented.
I've been using Sibelius forever and I feel like it hasn't improved at all in years.
Number three is the community.
So Musescore has got a lot of people pretty excited and there's a very active community
with people asking for help, offering help,
like I said developing plug-ins, developing software improvements.
There's a certain liveliness and energy in the community
of people who really want to support each other and support the software and keep it going.
So if you're brand new and you have a question,
odds are pretty good that you're going to get some help.
Number four is the sharing of scores.
So at first I didn't actually realize the difference between
musescore.org and musescore.com.
musescore.org is where you can download the software.
musescore.com is where people are actually sharing scores.
So for a lot of videos I've done on this channel I've actually been able to hop
onto musescore.com and find someone else's transcription of a theme I wanted to use,
which saved me some time from having to do the transcription by ear myself
So it's very easy to share your scores,
it's very easy to find what other people have arranged and written.
And if you're a student still learning how to notate or how to arrange
it's a really valuable resource.
Number five is a really important one,
and the one that surprised me the most is that it's at a professional quality.
So I kind of assumed, I guess because it's free or that it's open source,
that Musescore would be adequate.
That it would be fine.
I've tried a bunch of different apps for the iPad for doing notation.
None of them were really very good.
I always ended up just going back to Sibelius on my computer.
So I kind of expected the same from Musescore, that it would be good enough.
And from the little bit I played around with it I was pretty surprised that it's pretty much
on par with Sibelius or Dorico or Finale as far as note entry,
and advanced notation features, and adding basic things like tempo and dynamics.
All those things are there, they're really easy to use, it looks great,
it feels really good to use it. It's not clunky at all.
I was really kind of blown away by just the professional quality
of the software, it's really good.
Now unfortunately there are a couple of drawbacks, you know, it's not like the perfect software.
The one that people say to me every time when
they say they're using Musescore is that the playback is not very good.
So I've heard from a few people that version 4
is improving that and it's going to have VST support and overall better playback,
but where it is right now stuff doesn't really sound that good coming out of Musescore.
So it's great for writing in and sketching,
but when you play it back it might not be as satisfying as some of the other software.
I really love Note Performer and when I started using Note Performer in Sibelius
I enjoyed using Sibelius so much more.
And unfortunately I've heard that Musescore is not planning to integrate Note Performer
even in version four, which is a bit disappointing because I've
really enjoyed using Sibelius after getting Note Performer.
There definitely are some features in the big competitors that are not present in Musescore.
One is scoring to picture, which personally I don't really use that much.
Dorico has this pretty amazing MIDI editing section which brings it
much closer to a DAW as opposed to just a simple notation software.
But as far as the basic features and the things you want to do every day in notation
it's all there and it works really well.
So I actually intended this to be my Sibelius versus Dorico video, and the
longer I was experimenting with those two and just kept hearing more and more about Musescore
I was like "wait a second, am I even on the wrong train of thought here? Is there another option?"
So I've been kind of stringing along this "will I won't I" with Dorico for a couple of videos.
I'm pretty sure that when my Sibelius subscription runs out in October I'm not going to feel good
about paying for another year of software that is difficult to use and just never gets better.
So probably I'm going to switch to Dorico.
Although Musescore has really impressed me so far,
I think for my use using a professional level software makes a lot of sense.
I make my income writing music so it's definitely a business expense!
If you're a student or a hobbyist and you're looking for something to use notation for,
either for fun or maybe before you get your career going,
I see no reason you should use anything other than Musescore.
video I released a few weeks ago about how to write a counter melody to Zelda's Lullaby.
Thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one!