Sheet Music Music notation software

[mizmar]

They were the standard for Broadway and Hollywood,

That's the thing of it.
It'd cost everyone the same to rebuild it - but establishing the brand is another game altogether.

 

[mrblackbat]

A lot of the time it’s not cost effective to go and rebuild something in that manner. And continue to pay your existing obligations for staff etc whilst having no product to sell and bring in revenue.

 

[mizmar]

Well, none of us was in any boardrooms or business breakfasts. People behind Dorito and Musescore certainly threw some money at the problem... But nobody got value from the existing brand, which seems to have rotted in the field.

 

[skeller047]

Cost effectiveness is a very important point. I am a software developer (retired), and worked for a time on Encore, another dead notation program.

The thing is, notation software is very complex, as the “rules” of notation have been developed over hundreds of years, and are often illogical and contradictory. And furthermore need to be broken sometimes. So it takes a lot of time and/or money to develop software that can cope. The “ Good, fast, cheap - pick any two” rule is in play.

Furthermore, musicians are a minority population. Musicians who need notaion software are a minority of a minority.

I am sure MakeMusic (not the first owner of Finale) looked at these facts and made the financial decision to employ chewing wire and baling gum to keep it together. And then realized that their use of gum wire was also unprofitable.

 

[mizmar]

There's another thing which is the full fat notation desktop application... Call it musescore.org in so far as it is free.

Just to say, I had occasion to be pottering on the musescore.org website; seems to me that they've pretty well rebranded the tool as Musescore Studio. Maybe to more clearly differentiate it from the music score sharing, buying and selling project.

 

[progger]

As much as I love Dorico, I gotta admit that Musescore has really raised the bar for playback quality. The virtual instruments it includes sound pretty outstanding, and I'm not sure how they can continue to do stuff like that for free. Their subscription service must be doing pretty well.