First look at Musescore 4 and short look at my very first composition

So, Musescore 4 ...

My first impressions are ... meh. It does not (yet!) come across as smooth and pristine as Musescore 3 looks to me right now. A bit clunkier, a bit slower; you can only have 1 tab open (opening a second score will start another window) for sound engine reasons, and there is some overhead introduced by having to download MuseSound seperately via MuseHub, which is a program that will then decide to run in the background without asking you, for absolutely no reason.

I haven't done much with it yet, just a very short piano piece. Testing the sound - well, the piano sample is good, I think; the articulation does not sound any more sophisticated to me than in the previous version, and it is currently quite buggy. For example, if I click on the first note, and then 'play', it will do a fade-in, because, I suppose, the engine is not ready to start yet but we cannot let the user wait. However, if I click on the key before the first bar instead, it starts properly... I also saw some inconsistency with the cursor and what I actually hear.

I was surprised to find support for sagittal notation symbols - with detailed description notes including stuff like "2°up [43EDO]". That is promising, but since the sound engine cannot do the actual tuning, it is an empty promise as of now. (I already knew I would continue using Musescore 3 for xenharmonic stuff.) I don't know how compatible the new MuseSound will be with tunings in the long run.

As I said, I have only tested 1 piano sound yet, so I can't really say much about MuseSound, but I don't tend to trust new things... when I imported a random piece for a quick test I immediately run into some notes not being played, because they are out of range - are they tho? I have too often seen soundfonts being very conservative about what an instrument can play, completely unnecessarily constricting itself to a short range. Instead of, you know, just adding all the sounds anyways and if they sound bad, then they sound bad. I can edit a .sf2 file, but I won't be able to edit anything more complex, so I'm a bit pessimistic about that.

(While I do want to try writing down a few pieces of instrumental music that was meant for real instruments, and see how it looks, I also want to write something purely digital and there I don't know why I should give a fuck about a flute not being able to play a really low note, if it sounds right.)

~

Anyway, what I did write down was my very first composition (that I know of):

At the time, I could read german pretty well, but had zero knowledge of english pronounciation, and just randomly picked words that look cool. :D But I had strong opinions about the correct pronounciation: "head" is actually pronounced "heyd". I don't know whether I already had a particular meaning in mind when I was five, but I remember that a few years later I had decided that "Headboard Milano" was the name of a particularly gruesome war on my fantasy world. :)

This piece was written by someone with really small hands, so there are no wider spreads than a fifth and a sixth. It is very strange to me now, having very little (but some) memory of improvising on the piano until I had a canonical piece.

(I am going to be relentlessly proud about having written this at age 5. Sue me.)

edit:

Aaah I just remembered one more fun fact: The piece was always about a war: "white keys versus black keys" which is what's going on in the middle section. That's why there are F# major and C major chords. :D