Do you miss anything from Guitar Pro in MuseScore?

I'm sick of paying for upgrades to GP in the hope that the next version is less bad than the previous version. It peaked at either 5 or 6 (I think) but they required Mac users to upgrade to get a 64-bit binary. 7.0 feels much slower (Electron?) and seems to insist on keeping your mic open for some silly feature.

Guitar pro doesn't have as many features but it's a much better tool for rapid prototyping when you don't have a complete concept of the score in your head. It's easy to make continual changes on the fly using your keyboard without having to worry about the reflow, whereas muse score is incredibly stubborn about making sure that you have exactly the number of notes and durations in each bar.

When you're in a draft mode where are you just wanna be able to create it can be incredibly obstructive. I actually do a fair amount of prototype musical work in guitar pro before exporting it out as music XML and importing it into MuseScore for final typesetting.

GuitarPro 5 is an absolute masterpiece for quickly throwing together ideas. Version beyond 5 are just not worth it and I say it as someone who actually paid for 8.

Every piece of software I tried so far to replace GP5 has led me to return to GP5 within a couple of weeks.

TuxGuitar is fine for me.

TIL that the development of TuxGuitar has restarted

Add Darktable vs Lightroom to the mix.

Yeah for sure, thanks for reminding me! Except I use RawTherapee, which was actually the first FOSS program I swapped to from a paid (pirated) one without any sort of philosophical justification. It was just miles and miles better than the commercial apps (at least for my workflow).

I never understand for RawTherapee, how/where to use the sliders. Or anything really, I get super confused. Lightroom 6 is clunky, but I understand what happens.

That's interesting. Main tab has the usual suspects - exposure compensation, contrast, brightness, saturation. Then there are curves, same in every image software under the sun . Then there's shadows/highlights, again - no originality whatsoever. Can you describe what sliders are confusing to you?

Rawtherapee is probably my most used open source app ever, even counting vim. Only issue with it for me is lack of support for Lightroom presets.

For sure the learning curve is steep, but the control you're rewarded with is unparalleled. (Plus there's CIECAM02, one of the greatest color spaces of all time)

Yes RawTherapee is great too!

Still looking for a replacement for Ableton Live :(

You can get an Ableton Live Lite license for ~$4 by buying certain phone apps.

Eg, the Koala Sampler app comes with a license for it, and it's actually a very fun wee program in itself.

It's not full Ableton - but it's incredible value for $4.

Depends how much of Ableton you're using, Ardour may be usable for you. But it's definitely limited if you want the more professional features.