> "Upon further investigation, it became clear that Wenzheng Tang is a Chinese national, but not resident in China. As a guest in his current country, his residency status is predicated on a number of conditions, one of which is not violating the law.
> "If found in violation of laws, residency may be revoked and he may be deported to his home country.
> "This becomes even further complicated given another repo of his - Fuck 学习强国, which is highly critical of the Chinese government. Were he deported to China, who knows how he may be received."
See 'MuseScore/Audacity employee theatening to destroy a Chinese developer's life' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27881539)
I can't find any examples where Daniel Ray, the author of these comments, apologised or acknowledged these. They simply scrubbed them, and their employer continued to employ them.
Disgusting, if I was associated with Audacity, Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, audio.com, StaffPad, MuseClass or ToneBridge - I'd be pretty revolted by discovering this now, after-the-fact.
"Simply put, the actual process of requesting the take down and proving violation would have severe implication on Wenzheng Tang, so I have hesitated in the hopes he would simply choose to take it down himself."
"So, both repositories remain up, for now, not because we are powerless to take it down... it is that the process of exercising this power could very literally ruin the actual life of another person."
Some folk took the comment and decided to hyper sensationalise it. In truth, what the Muse guy was trying to say was that he wanted the offending user to see reason and stop hosting software that allowed users to get free access to paid content. His appeal was that is was pointless to risk legal action and he was right. Incidentally, they were well within their rights to pursue legal action. They cannot permit a backdoor to licensed content to exist.
Also worth mentioning that after this incident, they never did pursue legal action - so they obviously found some quiet solution instead. Of course that ruins a good story. God people love outrage so much, they are just unable to see the boring reality of things.
They asked some kid to stop creating systems that circumvent their licensing deals and he wouldn't do it. Then one of the employees appealed directly, using clumsy reasoning, and then loads of people pretended it was a threat and went on an outrage spree.
So tedious and dumb.
It feels like using a word-processor with a stuck "Insert" key - you're stuck in "overwrite" mode. This works for some aspects of entering music but is incredibly frustrating for others. This point has been raised many times on the fora but they are often dismissed in thinly disguised passive aggressive way ("you just don't understand the model, come back when you do").
This approach forces you to nail down the rhythm and measures first otherwise you're in a world of pain later. While a natural flow for me (and seemingly many others given the number of queries on the subject) is to start with the melody without too much regard for measures and fix up the timing later.
The odd thing is that it's clear that internally/technically, there is nothing that would prevent them allowing you to use the software in a more natural way (that supports cut/copy/insert/paste etc.) because there are ways to actually "insert" but it's made incredibly obscure by the way the UI hides this ability. I got the impression that the people running the project just didn't want to make it "easy" for users to work with a score in this way because it's just not the "correct" way to work with a score.
Despite this, I'm grateful for the effort that has gone into the Musescore series. Also I'll probably check out Musescore 4. I like Tantacrul's youtube channel.
But yeah... I learnt not to ask for a better workflow on the forum. It's full of "it's a complex app, you don't understand it" people.
When I asked about the incredibly crippled editing, I was attacked in the forums. I mean... the people were assholes.
- Musescore.com is run by Muse Group, formerly Ultimate Guitar. This is the sheet music sharing site which has a few controversies with downloading user scores, although this has improved a bit recently.
- Musescore.org is the GPLv3 notation software which they've announced the release for.
Muse is very good at keeping these two parts separated from each other. For example, the new "Muse Sounds" is installed via the closed-source "Muse Hub" (which economically makes sense as providing high-quality samples would be a fruitful business opportunity in the future) through a shared library.
Personally I think that this is a nice balance between maintaining the open-source software and providing features that practically only work with commercial backing - the reason that this could occur so quickly is because it reuses the playback engine and samples from StaffPad (https://www.staffpad.net), one of Muse's acquisitions.
I think they've brought it on themselves by using the same name for different things. If they used distinct names (like they did for the new stuff) then they wouldn't be in this mess.
I'd love if that team up-skilled in the same way the FOSS app has.
I'm doing my best to be fully FOSS these days and I can't thank the devs of these programs enough for giving me faith in humanity.
I'm sick of paying for upgrades to GP in the hope that the next version is less bad than the previous version. It peaked at either 5 or 6 (I think) but they required Mac users to upgrade to get a 64-bit binary. 7.0 feels much slower (Electron?) and seems to insist on keeping your mic open for some silly feature.
When you're in a draft mode where are you just wanna be able to create it can be incredibly obstructive. I actually do a fair amount of prototype musical work in guitar pro before exporting it out as music XML and importing it into MuseScore for final typesetting.
Every piece of software I tried so far to replace GP5 has led me to return to GP5 within a couple of weeks.
Eg, the Koala Sampler app comes with a license for it, and it's actually a very fun wee program in itself.
It's not full Ableton - but it's incredible value for $4.
I have a hard time trusting this company with anything, let alone my time and resources.
So it seems like "having the rights" and "actually useful scores" don't intersect very well. Music publishers want to publish scores that you can't edit, which I find mostly useless since I usually want to adapt them. It seems doubtful that Musescore could fix this other than by helping users do technically illegal sharing, as they've done it.
The new "official scores" are an exception; you can't even see them without paying. A step backwards in my opinion.
If you really want one of my musescore files, send me a message and I'll be happy to email it. Odds are other people on the site will do similarly.
Seriously, if you can't even accept this then let's just ban free software already.
I tried to sign up for a 7-day free trial, but when I clicked on that I got "You will be charged $3.69 today for one week." so having never heard of them before today, they already have me not trusting them.
I misread this as "monetizing". almost snorted.
What's so bad about the UI? is it dated because of it's structure? or does it seem dated because of widgets (the style, the way it is drawn?)?
The super powered UI problem is not quite solved, unless you accept microsoft's ribbon interfaces as a solution
What did I miss?
How have these two sites not clobbered each other over the name?
Same author also has a funny video on the UI of another music notation program, Sibelius: https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI
Entertaining, scathing and very educational. The latest video on the improvements made to MuseScore 4 is really interesting as well.
