MuseScore is probably one of the greatest things for musicians to come out in the past years, but there’s some major things about it that piss me off. First of all, musescore.com is an awful website and is constantly trying to sell you their subscription, and in the past I would brush this off, because the actual program was very usable, but with the addition of MuseSounds, it’s clear that they only want their third part commission, and not an accessible composition experience. Finally, the whole process of getting MuseSounds working is needlessly complicated. The entire experience of MuseScore is just needlessly frustrating sometimes.
If you’ve ever been on musescore.com, you know how clunky it is. The first screen of the website is purely either selling you their subscription, or features that you can only use with their subscription, and every time you wander into a pro feature, it makes you fill out a stupid survey that just leads you to a “buy our shit” screen. I remember when the whole point of MuseScore’s website was that it was the biggest source of free sheet music, but these days there’s almost no free sheet music, and they even made some scores paid only to view. I could understand if downloading the .mscz (MuseScore’s document file format) or .mxl (a standardized music notation format) file was behind a paywall, but PDFs were free, since the majority of the time I download off of MuseScore, I want the file to put back into MuseScore and edit it. Just now looking at the website, I’ve found this section on the index page for “New Playlists”, and this playlist titled “Video Games”, made by MuseScore themselves, with a—very poorly curated—AI generated cover photo of a Minecraft character with a one-armed creeper and an amorphous blue floating creature in the background. Overall, the entire site is just not very good, and I would love to recommend not to use it, however there is not a good alternative that I am aware of. I would love to host something like this, and you can see my attempt (which is very bare-bones at the moment) under the “Projects” section of my website’s header.
On the topic of over-monetization, another subtler example, is MuseSounds. To be blunt, the free MuseSounds packs are pieces of shit. There’s so many errors that makes them feel like they were thrown together in a weekend with middle school musicians. The balance in volume between each pack, and somehow, within each pack as well. Getting MuseSounds to sound balanced is like trying to get a band playing purely with a click track and no other input to sound balanced without telling each musician what to do. Every instrument interprets dynamics completely differently and are recorded completely differently as well. For example, the trombone is inaudible below forte, and the second you breach mezzo-forte, it’s ten times louder than any other instrument, and every instrument only caps out at about forte+, which makes it frustrating to write for something like a marching band which regularly operates above forte. Another weird thing is that the brass and percussion packs are recorded as if they’re in a concert hall, which is awesome and exactly what I’d want, however, the woodwind packs are inexplicably recorded as if they’re being recorded in a studio, which ruins the cohesion and makes it even harder to mix. This is only scratching the surface of the problems with MuseSounds, because it’s almost midnight and I’m very tired. Why is MuseSounds so poor in quality? It’s money (it’s always money). MuseSounds is made intentionally shitty so that you’re forced to buy other sound packs that actually sound good. I can’t vouch for how good other packs are, but it very much appears that other sample packs, such as CineBrass are much better than any of the MuseSounds packs, because they’re $60 and Muse doesn’t want to waste money on anything actually beneficial. If Muse actually cared about their users and not money, they would make dramatic MuseSounds usable, and make MuseSampler open source like the rest of MuseScore.
My last point is less interesting than the last two, but the process of getting MuseSampler reinstalled is really stupid. For some reason, MuseScore is too weak to do it by itself, and you need a special new program to get it installed or repaired, and sometimes, it’ll just freeze up and give you an error that says MuseSampler is already there like I don’t know that. It’s just a mess.
With everything MuseScore is done, it’s hard for me to hate them, but things have just gotten worse and worse in time, and it’s getting hard to support them. If you’re from Muse and reading this, just take this as a sign to get your shit together. I don’t want my favorite project to go to waste just because people want money. MuseScore will always be a community project and if Muse wants to change that, I will never support them.
Last editied August 30th, 2025