I was very surprised to see MuseScore has released a major update this month. I would suggest taking a look at it to get some ideas for the next version of Encore, but here’s a quick overview video they made.

My main beefs with MuseScore are 1) could never get realtime MIDI input to work in prior versions, and 2) out of the box, it was a bit of a chaotic mess with a lot of tweaking required to make the interface clean and easy to use. So in past attempts at using it I just found getting things rolling was slow, and I just clicked out and moved on. Encore’s strength to me was always its simplicity and ease of use. Yeah, the pop-up windows are annoying, but it was easy to get started and write out some classical guitar or piano scores. It was always way better to me than Finale and Sibelius in that regard–I hated those programs when I tried them years ago for the difficulty in just getting started and doing basic stuff.

However, there are lots of people out there who just want something to get started without forking over lots of money. And as a teacher, I wouldn’t want to require my students to pay a lot of money for a specific program that I use to create their lessons and exercises if there’s a way to give them a full electronic score they can easily open on their computer, vs. PDFs, which won’t let them do things like show or hide tablature, or hear playback, or change the playback speed, etc.

So, again, good to see what the competition is doing to see how the next version of Encore could be improved. I don’t expect or really want a score editor to be a synth or DAW, so I’m not as impressed by the new sound packs as some, but having decent sounds built-in, with no external software or gear required, does make it easier to get a sense of what a score you’re working on will sound like once performed.