I love music. I’ve been playing the violin for as long as I can remember. It has always been easy to find my songs for violin. A couple years ago, I switched to the double bass. Now, i can barely find any popular songs that are readily available. (without purchase because i’m broke 😝) Musescore has been good to me, until i go to the larger peices. I’m talking the scores that have +12 parts in them. The whole point of having a zoom in and out feature is so you can see the whole score in at least decent quality. But on Musescore (for some apparent reason) they decided “Oh, let’s screw over the lower sections and let them not be able to see their parts hahahaha.” Which, for me, I take as a personal attack because i’m a proud member of my section and I don’t take disrespect lightly. At least make a *FREE* (did i mention it needed to be FREE??) feature to where you can section off parts so you can actually see them. Honestly, these people are just here to get your money in the most apparent way possible. Do yourself a favor and just go to Google and search for the song you’re looking for, it’s much easier and cheaper too. And another thing. Don’t advertise your app as having “however many millions” of songs if you can only get to those songs through a paywall. It’s just being money hungry, and greedy. Like, i’ve already gone and downloaded your app, you already get money from that. What more do you want from us???

So this would be a 4 star, but there’s one thing that I think would make this app a whole lot better. That thing is, to be able to make score sheets in the app, or at least have an app that solely focuses on the ability to make score sheets that pairs with this app, as in you could upload scores you make in the supposed sister app from this app. And I haven’t exactly come across some of the issues other users have had with this app, except for when I try to open score sheets that are very long, so for instance medleys which tend to be over 10 or 20 minutes long. Every time I try to open a very long score sheet on the app, it freezes and I can’t do anything except for close the app and relaunch it. Meanwhile, the website has little to no problem opening the same exact score, and just to be clear I use a laptop that is over 2 or 3 years old, it’s a Dell and is not exactly great, and I use google chrome as my default browser. Other than that I don’t have any real problems with the app, and if you could conjure up something that allows users to make score sheets on their mobile device and upload from this app when on the go, that would be quite a make up for the mentioned “issues” that users comment on that I can’t seem to find or come across.

I’ve used MuseScore for a few years now, and it has fallen so far. It used to be a halfway descent app, where I could go to find sheet music easily and free. Sure it used to have its fair share of bugs, but I could look past those as it was simply the best option. Now, however, I don’t think it is really usable at all. It has fewer bugs, sure, but many of the recent changes have ruined the app completely. Firstly, the actual sheet music was changed from a page layout to a scrolling layout which makes it significantly harder to quickly navigate my music while I’m playing. This second one, which is less annoying, and makes sense from a monetization perspective, is the semi frequent fullscreen popups asking you to get the premium edition. It has been doing this for a while, but this one is excusable. What isn’t excusable, though, and what prompted me to write this review, is the recent addition of having a popup appear every 15 seconds or so while you are listening to a score asking you to buy the score. This popup stops the music, forcing you to take your hands off of your instrument, close the popup, and start the playback again. This is absolutely horrendous, and I will be looking for alternative places to find sheet music due to this. All of these problems can be fixed by purchasing the overpriced premium edition though. In the end, I hope the MuseScore devs figure out what went wrong, and bring back the app I used to love.

This app is amazing where transcribers, song writers, and general musicians can share their work and provide others the opportunity of learning something they can’t anywhere else. I especially love to reference this app for A Cappella because of the amazing transcribers found on this platform. There are major downsides, simply with the way it functions. Some features work one day, but either completely don’t work or crash the app another day. For instance, the option to listen to individual parts was somewhat functional, but then its button changed to “transpose” and I thought that was a pro feature. The individual part selector is something I relied on as a free feature as a chorus member. Sometimes when trying to listen to individual staves or parts, it will still play the other parts, and I would have to back out of the music and go back in just for it to work. Sometimes when listening to the song as a whole, the bar that indicates where you are in the song is ahead of behind of the audio, making it challenging or confusing to follow along. Again, the concept of the app is like no other and revolutionizes the music world, but it’s coming up short with its lack of reliability in functionality.