I'm very unhappy to see the recent addition of Musescore as a format. I think that in light of the recent events surrounding Audacity

,

- we as a community should not endorse Muse Group or any of their products in any way
- I wouldn't touch Musescore with a ten-foot pole, since the issues regarding telemetry/privacy mentioned in that article apply to Musescore as well.

So as per title, please remove/retire the Musescore format.

[edit: i got the badge. heh. but it would be cool to keep M. Score 4-Matt around, i need to get gold badge eventually...]

maybe like with deflemask, are there older versions that dont engage in the unwanted practices, that people would be able to have access to, to enjoy continued use of the software without the question marks over it?

there are plenty of older versions available on places like sourceforge

i recovered the good old 2.0.2 and 0.9 versions from thar... though i use 2.3.2 mostly, good stable version right in the middle there

i was thinking about renoise the other day but i think the demo is almost fully functional and lets u save, u just can't use ASIO or render to .wav or do a few other things

i wasn't aware of the license stuff with MUSE, so i appreciate your post regardless, even if i don't agree with removing the format/probably won't cease the use of audacity or musescore

Irrlichht, I would have to agree with you on this, telemetry in this program is highly questionable at best and I understand that privacy is a big issue for many people including myself.

However, in my own opinion, removing/retiring the format would not be a good idea. For a couple of reasons,
-The community not endorsing musescore would be hard when there are a few people in this community that does legitimately use Musescore for their own works/purposes.

-People use Musescore at their own discretion, as other people have their own preferences.

-Removing the musescore format runs the risk of excluding people from the community who might only use musescore.

As this was already a known issue, I suspect that there are workarounds regarding telemetry on the internet. If that does not work, maybe suggest an alternative or not use musescore at all.

It should also be made clear for people who didn't click through, that the information currently planned to be collected is very restricted in scope. Also, since it is an open source project, you can see exactly whether they're being honest about said scope.

You can make all the slippery slope arguments you'd like, but MUSE isn't itself a scary three-letter organization. The telemetry situation should be judged primarily on its present scope. If said situation changes, I will reconsider the issue.

For a lot of people, including me, it's not a big deal if Tantacrul gets to see, in aggregate with countless other users, a pseudonymized account of what filters I use. I simply do not care about that.

I think it's weird (and slightly condescending?) to insinuate that everybody should care about that to the degree you do. I am well aware the extent to which I am surveilled by technology companies and, by extension, more powerful actors, and having a smartphone for me is already giving up a lot more every second of my life.

Should one make that trade-off? I don't think individual moral actions matter much when it comes to broad systemic issues like this, in terms of "turning the tide". For the moment, given the relatively light nature of the telemetry, everyone should be able make their own choice.

i haven't read musescore's terms of service, but it feels kind of far fetched that an audio production vendor would disallow the sharing of the application's "end user work files" publicly.

if that's what we're talking about here.

pizza-chan you can read any of the posts in this thread to determine what issue is being discussed

Woah, that's a lot of hæit. Well if you're all so attached to the format, then I guess I'll just have to accept that, huh. However, I wanted to bring this up, because not everybody here might be aware that the company behind Musescore is involved in some rather shady business practices. And I thought we could have a constructive discussion about it.

Stuff like "if you dont wanna use the format, you dont have to." is not what I consider a constructive discussion. Like, seriously? I'm on this site long enough to know that, no? It's also completely besides the point.

My main gripe is with the proposed Privacy Policy

. Apparently Muse Group is willing to share any unspecified type and amount of data with law enforcement in any jurisdiction. Which means that for example if law enforcment in $evil_dicatorship request that $botbr's microphone be tapped, they'll do that. In my opinion, any company that's cool with that kind sh*t needs to go the way of the dodo, and quickly.

Among other things, Muse Group is also willing to share any data with any "potential buyer [emphasis theirs] (and its agents and advisers) in connection with any proposed [emphasis mine] purchase, merger or acquisition of any part of our business [emphasis mine]". Ugh, that's even more over-reaching than Facebook's policy.

The whole licensing thing is not a major concern for me, and more importantly it's nt relevant to Musescore. Musescore has had a CLA since long before they were acquired by Muse Group, so I don't see much of an issue here.

As far as Audacity is concerned, I'm cautiously hopeful that the Tenacity

fork will be the way forward. I've heard some Linux distros are considering switching to it, which is a very good sign, but overall it's too early to tell at this point.

Ok, one last remark about this: "open source/privacy hacker types are welcome to gather here but it's never been an official religion or anything, just another genre of guy who is welcome". Eh, you are aware that these "hacker types" are responsible for a good amount of the tools that are being used and cherished around here, right?

Anyway, so much for that. Now let's get on with our lives, eh.

that's a good clarification, my bad

@R3M well the reason I asked was because the posts didn't answer my question. and I know too little about the format itself

but if you don't want to be helpful or constructive, you don't have to.

ooo awesome, we can take control of the government with the power of music

@irrlicht project

it's fair reasoning (and i personally align this way too, i wouldn't use the program).

but in this sense i really do think it's up to the people whether they want to use it or not, with any privacy risks utilizing such a program creates.

atleast in regards to those reasons, it's not like hosting the files would pose any concern to botb itself (unless encouraging the use of a "bad" program should be botb's concern in the first place. OR, if i've missed something about what a submitted file contains, as said, i don't know much about the format hence my first question)

a big disclaimer would pretty much solve the problem in the best way possible, if anything. as you suggested @kfaraday

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+stop+programs+from+accessing+the+internet

I love how Vav resolved the whole thread with just one post

you can also run it in docker, it seems. if you're worried about getting fingerprinted.

depending on what you use it for

Does this mean we can't post Tantacrul videos on BotB anymore?

the criteria for all formats is that there are tools that are both free and available on the 3 major desktop operating systems

in the case that a format is a specific software it still needs to meet those requirements

people do argue against renoise from time to time, but there are a lot of tools that do not have .wav export (the main argument against)

i have no problem adding something like the following to the musescore description: "warning: this software is known to record personal information such as ip address and usage data"

i don't have legs to stand on when it comes to the morality of collecting user data to improve software (or selling to big data buyers) since i pay adobe $60/month for them to spy on me similarly (not that i have any plan for botb to do this!)

but i do agree botb could be sharing such a warning to let the user base know what they are subjecting themselves to

I can understand some hate against musescore, but for my part I'm using it for composing most of my music (and I don't care about the telemetry), so I'm pretty loving it.

But on the other hand what I don't understand is why there is a dedicated format for musescore in the first place: the final result is more or less exactly like a MIDIFILE

I think the things that make musescore stick out from a .midi file is the ability to customize sheet music layouts, chart chords, and place lyrics. I've already seen excitement around the idea of using musescore to make jazz lead sheets or pop song sheets so that others can battle around producing the same songs! :D

As a Musescore user myself, I've never had many issues with the telemetry they collect. I believe there's even a setting to turn it off (oh and I just checked, I did untick the telemetry box). If you were, really, really paranoid, both Musescore and Audacity are open source, so just compile it yourself with the telemetry turned off as a compiler flag.

entered "sudo apt remove audacity musescore" in the terminal right now!!! \o/ - anyway, as @Minerscale mentioned, forks of these software libre projects are not impossible, as they actually exist from audacity: https://github.com/Binaergewitter/audiocity and https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity - let's see if https://github.com/kemoniariver/MuseScore-Fork is going to get as clean, or some other fork project appears eventually