MuseScore

MuseScore

MuseScore 2.0 in full screen, showing palettes, inspector, and piano keyboard
Original author(s)	Werner Schweer
Developer(s)	Werner Schweer, Nicolas Froment, Thomas Bonte, and others
Stable release	2.0.3 / April 4, 2016 (2016-04-04)
Development status	Stable
Written in	C++, Qt
Operating system	Microsoft Windows, Linux, OS X, Android, iOS
Available in	48 languages
List of languages Afrikaans, Arabic, Asturian, Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, English, French, Galician, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Traditional Chinese, Traditional Chinese (Taiwan), Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian, Catalan, Greek, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Slovene, Faeroese, Slovak, Lithuanian, Croatian, Belarusian, Vietnamese, Esperanto, and Persian, although some translations are incomplete at this stage.
Type	Scorewriter
License	GNU General Public License
Website	musescore.org

MuseScore is a scorewriter for Windows, OS X, and Linux, comparable to Finale and Sibelius, supporting a wide variety of file formats and input methods. It is released as free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License.

Features

MuseScore's main purpose is the creation of high-quality engraved musical scores in a "What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get" environment. It supports unlimited staves, linked parts and part extraction, tablature, MIDI input, percussion notation, cross-staff beaming, automatic transposition, lyrics (multiple verses), fretboard diagrams, and in general everything commonly used in sheet music. Style options to change the appearance and layout are available, and style sheets can be saved and applied to other scores. There are pre-defined templates for many types of ensembles. Functionality can be extended by making use of the many freely available plugins.^[1][2]

MuseScore can also play back scores through the built-in sequencer and SoundFont sample library, and multiple SoundFonts can be loaded into MuseScore's synthesizer. There is a mixer to mute, solo, or adjust the volume of individual parts, and chorus, reverb and other effects are supported during playback.^[3]

Supported file formats

MuseScore can import MusicXML, MIDI, Band-in-a-Box, Guitar Pro, capella (in the cap3 format, not CapXML) and Overture formats, as well as its own MuseScore Format and Compressed MuseScore Format.^[4] It can export to MusicXML and MIDI file formats. Audio can be exported to WAV, FLAC, MP3, and OGG files, and engraved output can be exported to PDF, SVG, PNG, and PostScript formats, or it can be printed directly.^[3]

Although MuseScore cannot natively import Sibelius and Finale file formats, its support of MusicXML enables sharing between the different programs.

Online score sharing

The MuseScore Connect feature allows MuseScore users to publish and share their music online through MuseScore.com. The service allows paying subscribers to share unlimited scores. Free accounts are also available, but users are limited to uploading five scores. The MuseScore Start Center displays featured scores from the website.^[2]

MuseScore.com allows playback of a score in any browser supporting the HTML5 audio tag. A score can also be linked to an online video, so that one may follow the sheet music while watching a video featuring that score.

Mobile player

Since May 2014 MuseScore has mobile apps available for iOS and Android which tie into the MuseScore score sharing site.^[5] With features such as note playback, tempo change, transposition, part mixing, the app is aimed to support the music learning process. There is a free version and a paid-for version (Songbook) with more features.

Portable version

MuseScore also runs as a portable application. It can be stored on a removable storage device such as a CD, USB flash drive, flash card, or floppy disk, so that it can be run on any compatible computer system.

History

MuseScore was originally created as a fork of the MusE sequencer's codebase. At that time, MusE included notation capabilities and in 2002, Werner Schweer, one of the MusE developers, decided to remove notation support from MusE and fork the code into a stand-alone notation program.^[6][7] Since then, MuseScore has been under constant active development.

The www.musescore.org website was created in 2008, and quickly showed a rapidly rising number of MuseScore downloads.^[8] By December 2008, the download rate was up to 15,000 monthly downloads.

Version 0.9.5 was released in August 2009, which was stable enough for daily or production use, and support for Mac OS X was added.^[9] By October 2009, MuseScore had been downloaded more than one thousand times per day. By the fourth quarter of 2010, the number of MuseScore daily downloads had tripled again, and was downloaded 80,000 times per month.^[10][11] (At the end of 2013, the project moved from SourceForge to GitHub, and download statistics have not been publicly available since then, but in March 2015 a press release stated that MuseScore had been downloaded over eight million times.^[12])

MuseScore 1.0 was released in February 2011. Development has been continuous since then. The most recent version is MuseScore 2.0.3, released in April 2016.

A blog post in May 2016 announced that MuseScore 3.0 was under development.^[13]

Version history

Prerelease

• MuseScore 0.9.5 was released in August 2009. This was the first stable version, as well as the first version to support Mac OS X.^[9]
• MuseScore 0.9.6 was released in June 2010.^[14] This version introduced many new features, including out-of-the-box support for playback of all instruments based on the General MIDI standard, support for multimeasure rests, initial support for custom key signatures, and the "Save Online" feature connecting to sheet music sharing site musescore.com.^[15]

MuseScore 1

MuseScore 1.2 running on Ubuntu

• MuseScore 1.0 was released in February 2011.^[16] The milestone release focused on delivering a stable package rather than adding new features to the prerelease versions.
• MuseScore 1.1 was released in July 2011, fixing around 60 bugs and featuring improved jazz sheet support.^[17] MuseScore Connect, a feature allowing on-line community interaction and publishing, was also included in this release.^[18]
• MuseScore 1.2 was released in March 2012.^[19] This version included over 100 bug fixes, improved MusicXML import/export support, and improved support for special characters.^[20] It also introduced Marc Sabatella's original composition "Reunion" as the new demo score loaded when launching MuseScore.
• MuseScore 1.3 was released in February 2013 as a small update containing mostly bug fixes.^[21]

MuseScore 2

• MuseScore 2.0 was released in March 2015. A large number of new features were introduced, including full support for tablature and guitar chord diagrams, linked part/score editing, an image capture capability, two new music fonts, and MusicXML 3.0 support.^[22]
• MuseScore 2.0.1 was released in May 2015,^[23] fixing many bugs and introducing Isaac Weiss's "Getting Started" tutorial score along with several additional templates.^[24]
• MuseScore 2.0.2 was released in July 2015, with many bug fixes and new features, including playback of trills and other ornaments.^[25] The professional guide "Mastering MuseScore" was published in tandem with this release.^[26]
• MuseScore 2.0.3 was released in April 2016 with many bug fixes,^[27] and new features including the ability to reorder linked parts, a tool to copy all lyrics to the clipboard, and an AppImage build for all Linux flavors.^[28]

MuseScore 3

In May 2016, MuseScore.org announced that MuseScore 3 is in development.^[29] There is no specific release schedule; new versions are released when the developers consider them ready.

Development

Werner Schweer and Nicolas Froment working on MuseScore 2.0

MuseScore is free and open-source and is written mainly in C++. The development of MuseScore takes place on GitHub. Werner Schweer, Nicolas Froment and Thomas Bonte are the full-time and lead developers of the project, with a wider community also contributing. MuseScore supports both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, and the graphical user interface makes use of the cross-platform Qt toolkit.

Adoption

MuseScore's large number of daily downloads points to a high level of adoption by individual users. Many Linux distributions also include MuseScore in their software libraries,^[30] such as in the Ubuntu Software Center. MuseScore was also included in the VALO-CD collection, which provides free software for Windows.^[31]

Many educational institutions also make use of MuseScore, including Drew University and the Ionian University.^[32] The Board of Education of La Seigneurie des Milles-îles in Canada has also made MuseScore available on 10,000 computers across schools in the Milles-îles region in Quebec.^[33]

MuseScore and the Goldberg Variations

In 2011 a project was launched to create high-quality print and audio versions of the Goldberg Variations.^[34] The process influenced further development of MuseScore, with the addition of new features required for a high-quality score of the variations.^[35] The resulting enhancements to the software were released with version 2.0.

A Kickstarter campaign was launched, and the fundraising goal was met. MuseScore developers and musician Kimiko Ishizaka collaborated to create both an engraved score and an audio recording.^[36] The final engraved score was created entirely in MuseScore and can be downloaded free of charge.^[37]

In 2013 a project was launched to produce a braille edition of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, making music notation more accessible to blind and visually impaired musicians. The braille-format score of the Open Goldberg Variations is now available for free download.^[38]

See also

• List of scorewriters
• Comparison of scorewriters
• Free and open-source software
• List of music software

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to MuseScore.

• MuseScore homepage
• What's new in MuseScore 2
• MuseScore in Minutes, tutorial series by George Hess on YouTube