Today as part of my IDS project, I attempted to gain a better understanding of the music-scoring technology Sibelius, before deciding to switch to a different software in order to improve my workflow.

For a long period of time during my inquiry, I’ve been using Sibelius as a method of digitally transcribing my music. However, the process of using Sibelius, at least for me, was extremely tedious; the controls were unintuitive, the interface was poor, and the parent company, Avid, spared no expense in trying to force me to give them more money.

I wasn’t the only one with these gripes, in fact, as the music composer and Youtuber Tantacrul made an entire video complaining about the software, a video which, ironically, was recommended to me after watching a tutorial on how to add pickup measures(the tutorial in question was just as confusing as the software).

Realizing that Sibelius was holding me back, I decided to look for alternatives; I found a message board post also looking for an alternative software to Sibelius, and multiple people recommended MuseScore.

I downloaded MuseScore and tried it out, and it was much more streamlined and much simpler to use than Sibelius. I plan to transfer all my previous work to MuseScore, and use it for the rest of my project.

(This post is part of a series of entries into my Learning Journey for my IDS project in Music Composition.)

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