Tantacrul
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2019–2024
33:39 · 960K views · Mar 19, 2019
Tantacrul gives a detailed UX and UI design review of the MuseScore 3 notation software and compares it with Sibelius. It examines visual appeal, navigation and notation quality.
Cited as a funny, informative teardown of bad interface design, and for the story that MuseScore hired him as head of design afterward.
11 comments from Hacker News
The solution isn't to put things in preference windows either because even smart users will find that cumbersome. There's an interesting pair of videos (if you have some time) that goes over the UI of two competing music scoring software and why one is bad and the other good. [LINK] this video
they actually hired the person behind this video (tantacrul): this video It criticize the user interface and experience of various music application. I find it very entertaining yet still informative
If anyone's curious, here are Tantacrul's entertaining videos on MuseScore and designing MuseScore's new font, and the Audacity video from yesterday: this video [LINK] [LINK]
Obligatory funny video review of MuseScore 3 UI: this video Same author also has a funny video on the UI of another music notation program, Sibelius: [LINK]
That's very much it. You could also make an analogy to the arts of typography and typesetting. It's of the same importance to a composer or musician that the notation is legible and beautiful, as it is to a graphic designer or reader that type and layout are legible and beautiful. If the GP is interested in the topic, there are great videos by Tantacrul on his experience redesigning the notation font for MuseScore [0] and his overview of MuseScore 4.0's engraving improvements [1] - in particular this second video, concerning mainly layout, shows just how far this CSS approach would have to go to have a truly legible, reflowable layout in the face of beams/slurs/ties. (I don't want to take away from anyone on the Sibelius team, they're likely even better experts on the subject than Tantacrul is, but as far as I know, they didn't make long-form Youtube videos about the topic! He also likely got the job of leading the MuseScore redesign thanks to his previous videos that critiqued and reimagined the interfaces of music composition software... including older versions of Sibelius [2] and MuseScore [3]) [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] this video