Ensemble is billed by its creators as music score software specifically intended to make piping and drum scores for pipe bands. It claims to be able to play the scores so you can hear what the arrangement sounds like. It even claims to be able to import scores from other music software packages. It and all the score data reside in the cloud1 so you can share the scores with your whole band, or with your students, et cetera.
You have to pay to use Ensemble, which is totally fair. I support paying people to do work; it makes it possible for programmers to live indoors and eat once in a while. You can’t just pay once, though, because using the program entails an ongoing use of resources somewhere in the world. So, it’s a subscription2. There is a trial subscription that lets you poke around and do stuff for free for a week. Presumably, this will be so compelling that you’ll convert right away. It is not.
I’ve got a score that I’d like to listen to. So let’s try it out, shall we? No, I’m not going to walk through the whole process with screenshots, video clips, and commentary. That’s what testers get paid to do. Nobody’s paying me for this, this is just my blog.
Anyway. The score, if you do actually want to follow along, is “Wee Michael’s March“. Here, it is stored as an abc file. Ensemble purports to import such files. This import malfunctioned in that only the first tune in the file got imported, but the metadata about tune composer, rhythm, and so on from all the tunes got imported and attributed to the first tune. So that was no good.
Second try, I clipped out just the first tune into its own file and imported that. The time changes didn’t carry over, and there were several measures which had squiggly orange or red lines under them as well as a colored background. Presumably, these were error indicators, no doubt because the measures contained the wrong number of beats. Pressing the “play” button just started a bagpipe drone sound and an opening E, which sustained. Nothing else.
Third try, I used abc2xml to convert the single tune and imported that. Ensemble refused to import it: “We couldn’t find any scores in the file you uploaded”
So…maybe I could be a good citizen and file some kind of bug report? “Hey, guys, here is some sample data and steps to reproduce, your parsing of abc is kind of broken.” Nope. No feedback. No “contact us” link. You can, if you want, type into a chatbot box, but I strongly suspect that it’s not hooked up to anything. I tried that and got no responses.
