How I Designed a Free Music Font for 5 Million Musicians (MuseScore 3.6)

What Hacker News said

Strong rec jameshart · 2021-01 · on “MuseScore 3.6”

Tantacrul’s video about the creation of the new engraving font ( [this video] ) is also an important story about the MS-DOS Score program, software obsolescence and stewardship, and the loss of value that can happen when an industry relies on proprietary software. Without polemics or politics, this ends up presenting one of the strongest moral arguments for open source licensing.

Strong rec Slow_Hand · 2023-03 · on “Olympia Musicwriter”

That's really interesting. I don't envy anyone who had to do music engraving prior to the usage of computers, so hats off to you and thanks for your contributions. Musical notation is such a complex, intricate, system and even with computers it's still a challenging thing to get right. I've used several different notation programs over the years and most of them make me want to scream and cuss over how un-intuitive they are compared to hand-writing a score. There is so much complexity and specificity required of the tools. No doubt you've probably heard of Tantacrul and his Youtube channel. Watching him pick apart the design issues of every major notation software really highlights just how

Recommends meowface · 2021-05 · on “Audacity Aquired by Muse Group”

If anyone's curious, here are Tantacrul's entertaining videos on MuseScore and designing MuseScore's new font, and the Audacity video from yesterday: [LINK] [this video] [LINK]

Recommends jedimastert · 2022-05 · on “Clairnote: An alternative music notation system”

Tantacrul made a really interesting video about how incredibly difficult it is to make a notation font that might be a good watch[0], and I say that to say this: I see an issue here that left me confused for several minutes: the little bit of overlap when a note is attached to a line but not intersecting it looks like an alignment mistake and leaves ambiguity. My recommendation would be to have no overlap, with the top/bottom pixel of the note head in line with the top/bottom pixel of the staff line, like traditional notation. [0]: [this video]

Recommends amiga386 · 2024-05 · on “Printing Music with CSS Grid”

That's very much it. You could also make an analogy to the arts of typography and typesetting. It's of the same importance to a composer or musician that the notation is legible and beautiful, as it is to a graphic designer or reader that type and layout are legible and beautiful. If the GP is interested in the topic, there are great videos by Tantacrul on his experience redesigning the notation font for MuseScore [0] and his overview of MuseScore 4.0's engraving improvements [1] - in particular this second video, concerning mainly layout, shows just how far this CSS approach would have to go to have a truly legible, reflowable layout in the face of beams/slurs/ties. (I don't want to take aw

Cites thristian · 2022-02 · on “What Is a Music Engraver? (2016)”

It also doesn't mention SCORE[1], which is apparently still big among the more conservative music publishers[2]. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [this video]