That's by design, it's just you don't get it right. Just like ASCII graphics is by design. If there's a third party tools is because players were too lazy to play fair, like DiabloII users have maphack and such - it's just players who use it are way too pussy to rely on themselves, particularry with DII is when there's chances to actually lose their character if they fuck up. So all of this is anyones' problem but the game's. .

All music composition interfaces suck, period. Mankind yet to find a decent pattern there. So far there's actual music composition hardware (keyboads, samplers, etc) and there's electonic tracker interfaces and legacy-stuck track & notes layout, which track part is fairly OK but notes part always suck really hard. That's probably because some smartass decided it would be convenient to replace numerical representation with narrow bar which position you'd have to track across the screen with high precision, and for some reason at a time every single interface designer decided to follow that idiotic pattern. The programs also hide all the possible modifiers to your sound deep within niggaz' ass. And some programs have knobs you want simultaneously on different tabs that you can't have both opened. Like, why would you want spin these knobs, leave them alone. Classic trackers had notes and tracks combined, so that was both benefitical and inconvenient at the same time, everyone knows that. As for real hardware, you'd wish you had 8 hands like a spider.

There are common ideas about how UIs in general work. But for some reason, every single music-related program out there feels it needs to come up with its very own widgets and UI paradigms.

Where "all music program UIs suck" and "all open source UIs suck" really intersect is in the propensity to make really shitty usability decisions and then stalwartly defending them instead of listening to user criticism ("Wow, a lot of people are criticizing how [feature] works/are requesting [workflow]. Let's write a condescending post defending our current ways instead of implementing it!"). Like for example MuseScore's developers thinking that the right thing to do if a user increases a note's duration is to delete following notes in the bar.

I'll finish with Korval's old quote:

What would the logical alternatives be?

• shift all following notes to the right in the whole score

• shift the notes to the right only in one bar, deleting notes at the end of the bar

• changing the time signature at the bar to fit the changed note duration

• do nothing, it's the user's responsibility to count all notes and rests to make them even up

I can't come up with a better alternative. I remember my Encore did something like the last alternative. Except it usually corrupted the whole file.

Ok, so since it was designed to be like that, it doesn't suck.

The interfaces are by design, so they don't suck.

Because no information is lost, which is the difference between destructive and non-destructive editing.
Change the note back, and everything after it falls back into place. Or shorten another (e.g. the followng) note, and everything after it falls back into place.

The current system is only good if you a) are only using the program to transcribe an already fully written score (in which case you could be using Lilypond or, heck, raw MusicXML) and b) never ever make mistakes (or, for that matter, never decide to mess around with the timing of anything).

Very true. Although things like diatonic transposing, inversions, retrograde, augmentation etc. are being discussed frequently on MuseScore forums. MuseScore is in version 1.3 now and I've heard that the unstable 2.x version includes at least diatonic transposing. I wrote a plugin for diatonic transposing that works in 1.3 and it would be easy for me to expand the plugin for the other transformations, too.

I'd say that you can find a lot of analogies between text editors and sheet music editors. A text editor is as much a tool for writing novels as a sheet music editor is for composing music. A creative author can benefit from all kinds of features the text editor offers. A creative composer can benefit from the features in the score editor. And last but not least:

And the analogy is that if you can read and write, you will become a better author it's easier for you to become a good author.

Acceptable in many cases. It does change the position of each note inside the measure though, which may or may not be desirable.

Hell no.

Hell no.

Acceptable, as long as an "auto-rebar" feature is available.

But you forgot the best solution of them all:

*Use a data model that is correct.*

With an event stream data model, the problem goes away. You don't need to introduce measures as a hierarchy level of their own (except for the later stages of rendering), but for some reasons, all the major players do this, which leads to all sorts of BS. And while we're at it, why do they all insist on using some artificial "timing unit" or "ticks" to represent durations, instead of using actual fractions? Granted, those are trickier to implement, but for all that's sacred, just pick a fractional number library and call it a day.

My point entirely about the community's attitude...

Dwarf Fortress uses a very simple method for interfacing. That is what makes UNIX great. The problem however, is that it doesn't let you combine simple things to make complex ones. You're forced to spam keypresses like a monkey instead of doing using something elegant like "grep axemen | equip weapon"

The entire point of a (micro)management game is the management process, not trying to figure out how to get the game to do what you ask. That'd be like running a theme park and refusing to use radios and telephones to communicate and tracking down every staff member in person. Yeah, you can do it, but you'd be an incompetent manager. Or being an accountant who doesn't use a calculator or excel. The game is Dwarf management not "find the button."

I have used acid loops or w/e that was called, modplug, impulsetracker in dosbox and schism.

I tried to learn renoise but its too confusing for me. And no playback library means there is no point.

My interest is making cool sounding music that is smaller in file size than vorbis so 30-100kb for a 2-7minute song that sounds good enough.

But modern computer music just sounds so much more hi fidelity than average tracker music these days you know?