MuseScore

This week, we rolled out a new version of MuseScore.com. Redesigned from the ground up, the site is now able to handle more traffic, has tightened security, and is much more touch-friendly and optimized for devices with differently sized displays. ... [More] What’s more, with the Drupal platform that the site is built on upgraded, we can now use state-of-the-art software libraries to further improve and extend MuseScore.com’s functionality, as well as the user experience.While we’re still working to address some problems that popped up in the transition, we’re excited to kick off our new series, “MuseScorer of the month.” This is your chance to get to know one of MuseScore.com’s many brilliant members each month of 2017 (and, perhaps, beyond). We will feature a wide variety of composers and types of music in this series. So, without further ado, meet Timothy K Hamilton!How did you discover MuseScore?I found MuseScore while I was looking for a low-cost alternative to the costlier software composition packages. At that time, I started with version 1.1, I think, in February of 2015. It took me about a month to get up the courage to upload a piece to the MuseScore.com website. By my third composition, I had two comments on the day it was uploaded, one by Mike Magatagan, a true wizard of MuseScore. I found that one key was consistency: uploading a work every week or two, and spacing it out fairly evenly. At the same time, I discovered the enjoyment of “following” other composers and listening and commenting on their work.What motivates you to compose?I’m a member of the Episcopal Church, and many of the pieces I have uploaded fall into Church and Christian music genres, though I also have done more instrumental work. The comments system both gives me a chance to encourage other composers, and to receive encouragement or enlightenment about something I overlooked. Both are fun and helpful, and help keep me going when I feel like giving up (as most composers do from time to time, I reckon). I can honestly say that I probably have doubled or tripled my output in the last year and one half due to the community at MuseScore and their receptivity and support.What is your typical composing workflow like?I generally start my pieces with a melody line, since I think a fine melody is crucial to a good musical work. The chord underpinnings can be many and varied for the same melody line, and take some “feel” and trial and error to get right. For my lighter, smaller, keyboard pieces, I generally compose on the keyboard, even though my piano skills are highly limited. For larger works, I start right in MuseScore, where I can listen to what I have written immediately after it has been written and make changes instantly. When I think I’ve finished a piece, I play it at about ¼ speed or less to listen to the chord and non-chord progressions and make sure they are solid, or at least that I like them.What have you shared on MuseScore.com that you’re most proud of?The Episcopal Church has a beautiful service of music called “Evensong”. If you have an Episcopal Cathedral or large congregation in your area, you might give it a listen. One of the pieces that is always sung is the “Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis”. I just completed writing and uploading my 4th one of these. I know there is a limited audience for four-part choral pieces, but I’m quite proud and excited about the work I’ve done on these.Check out Timothy’s latest gorgeous Magnificat.Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in E flat Major op. 32 by Timothy K HamiltonWatch for our next MuseScorer of the month in February! [Less]

This week, we rolled out a new version of MuseScore.com. Redesigned from the ground up, the site is now able to handle more traffic, has tightened security, and is much more touch-friendly and optimized for devices with differently sized displays. ... [More] What’s more, with the Drupal platform that the site is built on upgraded, we can now use state-of-the-art software libraries to further improve and extend MuseScore.com’s functionality, as well as the user experience.While we’re still working to address some problems that popped up in the transition, we’re excited to kick off our new series, “MuseScorer of the month.” This is your chance to get to know one of MuseScore.com’s many brilliant members each month of 2017 (and, perhaps, beyond). We will feature a wide variety of composers and types of music in this series. So, without further ado, meet Timothy K Hamilton!How did you discover MuseScore?I found MuseScore while I was looking for a low-cost alternative to the costlier software composition packages. At that time, I started with version 1.1, I think, in February of 2015. It took me about a month to get up the courage to upload a piece to the MuseScore.com website. By my third composition, I had two comments on the day it was uploaded, one by Mike Magatagan, a true wizard of MuseScore. I found that one key was consistency: uploading a work every week or two, and spacing it out fairly evenly. At the same time, I discovered the enjoyment of “following” other composers and listening and commenting on their work.What motivates you to compose?I’m a member of the Episcopal Church, and many of the pieces I have uploaded fall into Church and Christian music genres, though I also have done more instrumental work. The comments system both gives me a chance to encourage other composers, and to receive encouragement or enlightenment about something I overlooked. Both are fun and helpful, and help keep me going when I feel like giving up (as most composers do from time to time, I reckon). I can honestly say that I probably have doubled or tripled my output in the last year and one half due to the community at MuseScore and their receptivity and support.What is your typical composing workflow like?I generally start my pieces with a melody line, since I think a fine melody is crucial to a good musical work. The chord underpinnings can be many and varied for the same melody line, and take some “feel” and trial and error to get right. For my lighter, smaller, keyboard pieces, I generally compose on the keyboard, even though my piano skills are highly limited. For larger works, I start right in MuseScore, where I can listen to what I have written immediately after it has been written and make changes instantly. When I think I’ve finished a piece, I play it at about ¼ speed or less to listen to the chord and non-chord progressions and make sure they are solid, or at least that I like them.What have you shared on MuseScore.com that you’re most proud of?The Episcopal Church has a beautiful service of music called “Evensong”. If you have an Episcopal Cathedral or large congregation in your area, you might give it a listen. One of the pieces that is always sung is the “Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis”. I just completed writing and uploading my 4th one of these. I know there is a limited audience for four-part choral pieces, but I’m quite proud and excited about the work I’ve done on these.Check out Timothy’s latest gorgeous Magnificat.Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in E flat Major op. 32 by Timothy K HamiltonWatch for our next MuseScorer of the month in February! [Less]

It’s an exciting time for MuseScore at the moment, with massive changes underway both in the code and on the website, helping to ensure that musicians have the tools they need to create and share amazing content! However, there is one more thing ... [More] that every budding composer needs: inspiration! It is my great privilege to announce OpenScore, the successor project to Open Goldberg and Open Well Tempered Clavier. The goal with those projects was to liberate specific works by Bach. The goal with OpenScore is much more ambitious; we want to liberate all public domain music! The aim is to digitise and liberate the works of Mozart, Beethoven and other famous classical composers by making their scores freely available in MuseScore’s MSCZ format. This enables convenient sharing, adaptation and playback across a range of devices, including computers, phones and tablets. The scores will also be available in various other formats, including PDF, MIDI and MusicXML, as well as accessible formats like Braille and Modified Stave Notation for blind and partially sighted musicians. Best of all, the scores will be released under a Creative Commons license, meaning there are no copyright restrictions, so everyone will be free to use them for any purpose! This will be of huge benefit to orchestras, choirs and individuals looking for materials from which to practise music. It will also facilitate a number of uses in research, academia, and education, and help to inspire composers and arrangers in producing new content. To make it happen, MuseScore is joining forces with IMSLP and a number of partners across the music and tech industries. However, for OpenScore to be a success we also need the help of the community. MuseScore and IMSLP represent the two largest online communities actively creating and sharing sheet music. We want to harness this potential to create the largest, and most accurate, digital collection of public domain scores available anywhere. We need your help to make this happen. In the coming months we will be running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to fund the liberation effort. We will be very grateful if those of you who are able to could donate to the crowdfunding campaign, and help spread the word among friends and family, and via social media, etc. Once the campaign is live, it’s very important that we get the word out as quickly as possible to build momentum. (The campaign isn’t live at the moment, so don’t start sharing just yet!) There are other ways you can get involved too, such as by helping to produce the transcriptions of public domain works in MuseScore format. There will even be rewards available, in the form of PRO accounts on MuseScore.com, for users who complete transcriptions that make it into the OpenScore collection. If you’ve always fancied having a PRO account, but didn’t have the money to buy one, then now you will have the chance to earn one! Finally, we’re looking for talented people within the community to come forward to help us ensure that OpenScore has the greatest possible impact. If you have some experience with online marketing, communication or graphic design and are willing to help out then please get in touch via my contact form. P.S. Look out for us at FOSDEM 2017 where we will be announcing OpenScore to the world! Previous Section Next GSoC 2016 - Project Demo Videos - Semi-Realtime MIDI shoogle's blog OpenScore: Join the transcription effort! [Less]

It’s an exciting time for MuseScore at the moment, with massive changes underway both in the code and on the website, helping to ensure that musicians have the tools they need to create and share amazing content! However, there is one more thing ... [More] that every budding composer needs: inspiration! It is my great privilege to announce OpenScore, the successor project to Open Goldberg and Open Well Tempered Clavier. The goal with those projects was to liberate specific works by Bach. The goal with OpenScore is much more ambitious; we want to liberate all public domain music! The aim is to digitise and liberate the works of Mozart, Beethoven and other famous classical composers by making their scores freely available in MuseScore’s MSCZ format. This enables convenient sharing, adaptation and playback across a range of devices, including computers, phones and tablets. The scores will also be available in various other formats, including PDF, MIDI and MusicXML, as well as accessible formats like Braille and Modified Stave Notation for blind and partially sighted musicians. Best of all, the scores will be released under a Creative Commons license, meaning there are no copyright restrictions, so everyone will be free to use them for any purpose! This will be of huge benefit to orchestras, choirs and individuals looking for materials from which to practise music. It will also facilitate a number of uses in research, academia, and education, and help to inspire composers and arrangers in producing new content. To make it happen, MuseScore is joining forces with IMSLP and a number of partners across the music and tech industries. However, for OpenScore to be a success we also need the help of the community. MuseScore and IMSLP represent the two largest online communities actively creating and sharing sheet music. We want to harness this potential to create the largest, and most accurate, digital collection of public domain scores available anywhere. We need your help to make this happen. In the coming months we will be running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to fund the liberation effort. We will be very grateful if those of you who are able to could donate to the crowdfunding campaign, and help spread the word among friends and family, and via social media, etc. Once the campaign is live, it’s very important that we get the word out as quickly as possible to build momentum. (The campaign isn’t live at the moment, so don’t start sharing just yet!) There are other ways you can get involved too, such as by helping to produce the transcriptions of public domain works in MuseScore format. There will even be rewards available, in the form of PRO accounts on MuseScore.com, for users who complete transcriptions that make it into the OpenScore collection. If you’ve always fancied having a PRO account, but didn’t have the money to buy one, then now you will have the chance to earn one! Finally, we’re looking for talented people within the community to come forward to help us ensure that OpenScore has the greatest possible impact. If you have some experience with online marketing, communication or graphic design and are willing to help out then please get in touch via my contact form. P.S. Look out for us at FOSDEM 2017 where we will be announcing OpenScore to the world! Read on OpenScore blog: https://www.openscore.cc/blog/introducing-openscore Previous Section Next GSoC 2016 - Project Demo Videos - Semi-Realtime MIDI shoogle's blog OpenScore: Join the transcription effort! [Less]

It’s an exciting time for MuseScore at the moment, with massive changes underway both in the code and on the website, helping to ensure that musicians have the tools they need to create and share amazing content! However, there is one more thing ... [More] that every budding composer needs: inspiration! It is my great privilege to announce OpenScore, the successor project to Open Goldberg and Open Well Tempered Clavier. The goal with those projects was to liberate specific works by Bach. The goal with OpenScore is much more ambitious; we want to liberate all public domain music! The aim is to digitise and liberate the works of Mozart, Beethoven and other famous classical composers by making their scores freely available in MuseScore’s MSCZ format. This enables convenient sharing, adaptation and playback across a range of devices, including computers, phones and tablets. The scores will also be available in various other formats, including PDF, MIDI and MusicXML, as well as accessible formats like Braille and Modified Stave Notation for blind and partially sighted musicians. Best of all, the scores will be released under a Creative Commons license, meaning there are no copyright restrictions, so everyone will be free to use them for any purpose! This will be of huge benefit to orchestras, choirs and individuals looking for materials from which to practise music. It will also facilitate a number of uses in research, academia, and education, and help to inspire composers and arrangers in producing new content. To make it happen, MuseScore is joining forces with IMSLP and a number of partners across the music and tech industries. However, for OpenScore to be a success we also need the help of the community. MuseScore and IMSLP represent the two largest online communities actively creating and sharing sheet music. We want to harness this potential to create the largest, and most accurate, digital collection of public domain scores available anywhere. We need your help to make this happen. In the coming months we will be running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to fund the liberation effort. We will be very grateful if those of you who are able to could donate to the crowdfunding campaign, and help spread the word among friends and family, and via social media, etc. Once the campaign is live, it’s very important that we get the word out as quickly as possible to build momentum. (The campaign isn’t live at the moment, so don’t start sharing just yet!) There are other ways you can get involved too, such as by helping to produce the transcriptions of public domain works in MuseScore format. There will even be rewards available, in the form of PRO accounts on MuseScore.com, for users who complete transcriptions that make it into the OpenScore collection. If you’ve always fancied having a PRO account, but didn’t have the money to buy one, then now you will have the chance to earn one! Finally, we’re looking for talented people within the community to come forward to help us ensure that OpenScore has the greatest possible impact. If you have some experience with online marketing, communication or graphic design and are willing to help out then please get in touch via my contact form. P.S. Look out for us at FOSDEM 2017 where we will be announcing OpenScore to the world! [Less]

It’s an exciting time for MuseScore at the moment, with massive changes underway both in the code and on the website, helping to ensure that musicians have the tools they need to create and share amazing content! However, there is one more thing that ... [More] every budding composer needs: inspiration! It is my great privilege to announce OpenScore, the successor project to Open Goldberg and Open Well Tempered Clavier. The goal with those projects was to liberate specific works by Bach. The goal with OpenScore is much more ambitious; we want to liberate all public domain music! The aim is to digitise and liberate the works of Mozart, Beethoven and other famous classical composers by making their scores freely available in MuseScore’s MSCZ format. This enables convenient sharing, adaptation and playback across a range of devices, including computers, phones and tablets. The scores will also be available in various other formats, including PDF, MIDI and MusicXML, as well as accessible formats like Braille and Modified Stave Notation for blind and partially sighted musicians. Best of all, the scores will be released under a Creative Commons license, meaning there are no copyright restrictions, so everyone will be free to use them for any purpose! This will be of huge benefit to orchestras, choirs and individuals looking for materials from which to practise music. It will also facilitate a number of uses in research, academia, and education, and help to inspire composers and arrangers in producing new content. To make it happen, MuseScore is joining forces with IMSLP and a number of partners across the music and tech industries. However, for OpenScore to be a success we also need the help of the community. MuseScore and IMSLP represent the two largest online communities actively creating and sharing sheet music. We want to harness this potential to create the largest, and most accurate, digital collection of public domain scores available anywhere. We need your help to make this happen. In the coming months we will be running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to fund the liberation effort. We will be very grateful if those of you who are able to could donate to the crowdfunding campaign, and help spread the word among friends and family, and via social media, etc. Once the campaign is live, it’s very important that we get the word out as quickly as possible to build momentum. (The campaign isn’t live at the moment, so don’t start sharing just yet!) There are other ways you can get involved too, such as by helping to produce the transcriptions of public domain works in MuseScore format. There will even be rewards available, in the form of PRO accounts on MuseScore.com, for users who complete transcriptions that make it into the OpenScore collection. If you’ve always fancied having a PRO account, but didn’t have the money to buy one, then now you will have the chance to earn one! Finally, we’re looking for talented people within the community to come forward to help us ensure that OpenScore has the greatest possible impact. If you have some experience with online marketing, communication or graphic design and are willing to help out then please get in touch via my contact form. P.S. Look out for us at FOSDEM 2017 where we will be announcing OpenScore to the world! [Less]

In 2010, Nicolas, Werner and I met each other for the very first time in Brussels. We had already worked together for a couple of years online, and while I individually met Nicolas and Werner before, it was our first real life encounter in the same ... [More] place. That place was FOSDEM, the largest open source conference in Europe. For the upcoming edition of FOSDEM 2017, taking place during the first weekend of Feb (4-5), we are coming together once again, but this time we hope to do this with as many MuseScore users and contributors as possible. I'm really happy to announce that nine of us have already confirmed to join the gathering: thomas (BE) werner (DE) lasconic (FR) shoogle (UK) tinman (CZ) Jojo-Schmitz (DE) Jeetee (BE) Leon Vinken (NL) DanielR (UK) So if you like to join us as well and enjoy a great time together at FOSDEM, including a dinner on Saturday evening, than leave a comment on this post or reach out to me directly. Hope to see you in February! [Less]

In 2010, Nicolas, Werner and I met each other for the very first time in Brussels. We had already worked together for a couple of years online, and while I individually met Nicolas and Werner before, it was our first real life encounter in the same ... [More] place. That place was FOSDEM, the largest open source conference in Europe. For the upcoming edition of FOSDEM 2017, taking place during the first weekend of Feb (4-5), we are coming together once again, but this time we hope to do this with as many MuseScore users and contributors as possible. I'm really happy to announce that eight of us have already confirmed to join the gathering: thomas (BE) werner (DE) lasconic (FR) shoogle (UK) tinman (CZ) Jojo-Schmitz (DE) Jeetee (BE) Leon Vinken (NL) So if you like to join us as well and enjoy a great time together at FOSDEM, including a dinner on Saturday evening, than leave a comment on this post or reach out to me directly. Hope to see you in February! [Less]

In 2010, Nicolas, Werner and I met each other for the very first time in Brussels. We had already worked together for a couple of years online, and while I individually met Nicolas and Werner before, it was our first real life encounter in the same ... [More] place. That place was FOSDEM, the largest open source conference in Europe. For the upcoming edition of FOSDEM 2017, taking place during the first weekend of Feb (4-5), we are coming together once again, but this time we hope to do this with as many MuseScore users and contributors as possible. I'm really happy to announce that ten of us have already confirmed to join the gathering: thomas (BE) werner (DE) lasconic (FR) shoogle (UK) tinman (CZ) Jojo-Schmitz (DE) Jeetee (BE) Leon Vinken (NL) DanielR (UK) IZI Music (FR) So if you like to join us as well and enjoy a great time together at FOSDEM, including a dinner on Saturday evening, then leave a comment on this post or reach out to me directly. Hope to see you in February! [Less]

2016 was a wonderfully busy year for MuseScore. As we head into 2017 looking forward to new accomplishments and milestones, let’s take a moment to look back over the year gone by. 2.0.3 update We spent the first part of the year preparing MuseScore ... [More] version 2.0.3, the last update to MuseScore 2.0, which we released at the beginning of April 2016 with more than 200 changes. Read all about it at MuseScore 2.0.3 is released! (There was later an emergency 2.0.3.1 update for only the Mac version to make MuseScore compatible with macOS Sierra.) Google Summer of Code No sooner was the 2.0.3 release out of the way than the Google Summer of Code began, with MuseScore developers teaming up with four student programmers from around the world to add new features to MuseScore. Their work, which wrapped up at the end of August, went directly into forming the basis the next major version of MuseScore. Read all about the results at Wrapping up Google Summer of Code 2016! Developing MuseScore 3 Along with the Google Summer of Code work, MuseScore creator Werner Schweer began an ambitious overhaul of MuseScore’s source code to make the software smarter, faster, and easier to use. Everything came together when we officially launched the development of MuseScore 3.0 in May 2016. Learn more about how we’re making MuseScore Smarter, Faster, and Easier! 2016 by the numbers Code contributors The MuseScore 3.0 development effort attracted new contributors to the codebase. On December 21st, Vinayak Vivek became the 90th person to contribute code to MuseScore in the past four years (nearly half of those 90 people contributed in 2016). Vinayak’s fix for the alignment of a triangular notehead will be in the next version of MuseScore (see below). MuseScore.org activity In 2015, when versions 2.0, 2.0.1, and 2.0.2 were all released, there was a dramatic jump in activity on the MuseScore.org forums, approximately doubling from previous years. Although 2016 was a relatively quiet year by comparison, and some activity shifted to the MuseScore Discussion and Support group on Facebook, the numbers held steady at their newly high levels. In 2016, there were: A little over 6,500 forum posts A little over 1,700 issues logged in the tracker And about 42,500 comments … Posted by about 3,300 unique users About 1,250 edits to the MuseScore Handbook … By 88 unique users 22 new plugins in the plugin repository ... Created by 17 people Translation Our international team of volunteer translators has translated MuseScore 2.0.3’s interface into 35 languages, with dozens more partially complete. The Arabic (Sudan, Egypt), Chinese (Traditional), Esperanto, Portuguese, Serbian, Korean, Finnish, and Hebrew teams in particular all worked diligently this year to complete their translations, so you can now use MuseScore in any of those languages and thank them for their work. You can help translate MuseScore, too, as well as the online Handbook! See Translation instructions. Downloads Since the release of version 2.0.3 at the beginning of April 2016, in the past nine months, MuseScore has been downloaded approximately 1.9 million times. This works out to about 211,000 monthly downloads, or over seven thousand downloads per day. Looking ahead As stated above, 2.0.3 was the last update to version 2.0, and the focus is now on 3.0 development. We invite you to test the latest features in the nightly builds, and report the problems you encounter. Your feedback is very welcome in the Technology Preview forum, and precise bug reports can be directly posted in the Issue tracker. If you’re a programmer as well as a musician, we would appreciate your help fixing those bugs—as MuseScore is free and open source, anyone can get the source and share code contributions on GitHub. Don't forget that you can also support the future of MuseScore with a donation. But 3.0 is still a long way from ready to release. In the short term? Get ready for MuseScore 2.1—planned for release in the first quarter of 2017. This will be a sizable step forward from the 2.0 series. Expect a new “Swap” function, support for SFZ sample libraries, and so much more. Prerelease nightly builds for 2.1 are now available for download from the same page as the 3.0 nightlies, and unlike the 3.0 builds, the 2.1 builds are already quite stable. We welcome your feedback and reports of problems you encounter in the Technology Preview forum so we can make the 2.1 release in the next few months the best it can possibly be. That’s all for 2016. Happy New Year, everybody! [Less]