MuseScore

As part of the UX design efforts, I'd like to learn about the ways you work with MuseScore, no matter whether you're a newbie who has no prior experience writing scores and is just trying it out or a seasoned professional. Would any of you be up for a 30 minute video chat, where we would discuss the situations in which you transcribe music?

MuseScore 2.0.3.1 update is now available for download and fixes one bug for MacOS Sierra. This "emergency" release was triggered by an issue reported by several users about a "black screen" or "black page" on Mac OS 10.12 Sierra. You can see the ... [More] whole discussion and process to fix this bug in the issue tracker. The 2.0.3.1 release for MacOS is exactly like MuseScore 2.0.3 but it contains 2 fixes: The black screen or black page bug is fixed For retina displays, the icons are now better looking And this is it! You can safely upgrade to 2.0.3.1 whether you are already on MacOS Sierra or not. [Less]

MuseScore 2.0.3.1 update is now available for download and fixes one bug for MacOS Sierra. This "emergency" release was triggered by several reports about "black screen" or "black page" on Mac OS 10.12 Sierra. You can see the whole discussion and ... [More] process to fix this bug in the issue tracker. The 2.0.3.1 release for MacOS is exactly like MuseScore 2.0.3 but it contains 2 fixes: The black screen or black page bug is fixed For retina displays, the icons are now better looking And this is it! You can safely upgrade to 2.0.3.1 whether you are already on MacOS Sierra or not. [Less]

On August 30, it was the end of Google Summer of Code 2016. Google announced over a thousand successful projects and for MuseScore’s third participation, we are extremely happy with the results. We had four students working on several exciting ... [More] projects for three months. Read further to learn about the results of their summer coding. Semi-realtime MIDI note entry MuseScore 2 lets you enter music with the mouse, the computer keyboard or a MIDI piano keyboard. With all of those methods, you need to select the note or rest duration first with your computer keyboard or mouse before entering the chord or the notes you want, even if you then use the MIDI keyboard to specify the pitch of the note. Peter “shoogle” Jonas took up the challenge to improve this and implemented three new ways to enter music in MuseScore, one of which is essentially to play the part on your keyboard with a metronome and watch it be converted to sheet music as you go. To learn more, watch Peter walking you through the new semi real-time MIDI mode, read his summer blog, or test it out in the nightly builds* — click the little arrow next to the N icon in the toolbar. Improving default playback Johannes “hpfmn” Wegener wanted to improve MuseScore’s playback capabilities. First he greatly improved the SFZ synthesizer embedded in MuseScore called Zerberus. Before the summer, Zerberus was barely able to play the excellent Salamander Piano bank; now it has been tested with hundreds of free SFZ libraries. You can test it yourself with a nightly* by loading your SFZs into MuseScore via View > Synthesizer > Zerberus, and these improvements will even be in MuseScore 2.0.4 (if and when it happens). SFZ is a lot more versatile and powerful than SF2 SoundFonts. Hopefully Johannes’ efforts pave the way for more high quality free and open source SFZ libraries. Quality sounds and a more powerful file format to describe them is a mandatory step towards better playback, but MuseScore also needed to understand better some markings on the score. It needs to know how a crescendo on a single note that lasts several measures is played on a violin, or how a slur is played with a flute or a piano. In order to teach MuseScore all these rules, Johannes added a new concept called “Soundbanks”. He explains it in the following video and his blog. It’s still work in progress and not yet available in nightlies*. Voice to part tool and extended Implode/Explode tool MuseScore 2 allows linked parts, where you create the score, create parts and any modification in the score is also made in the part and vice versa. However, currently if you have a score with Soprano and Alto lines (for instance) combined on one staff, there is no way to link these voices to two separate parts for Soprano and Alto. This summer, Felix “RocketOne” Brauchle’s challenge was to solved this problem and he managed! You can try this feature in nightly builds*. Felix also greatly improved the existing Implode/Explode tools, which will be found under the Tools menu. In MuseScore 2, these tools allow you to explode voice 1 chords onto multiple staves, implode voice 1 from multiple staves into a single staff, and implode voices within a single staff, if they have similar rhythms, to voice 1 chords. Felix made the tools smart enough to handle almost any number and combination of voices in the best way you could expect. These tools should now make it easier to create a piano reduction from a choral score, or a choral score from a piano score, for example. You can read all the details in Felix’s blog. His code is not yet entirely in the nightlies* but it will be reviewed and merged in the coming weeks. Annotations Ruchit “shredpub” Agrawal had big goals to support annotations in MuseScore. His initial plans included text, range annotation, shapes and the ability to customize and hide annotations. He successfully implemented two annotation features, under the Add > Annotations menu: a new kind of text for Annotations, and a way to add colored highlights to selected notes or measures. You can read all the details in his blog. His work could be the foundation for a proper annotation support in MuseScore but it’s still in its early stage. Conclusion First congratulations to the successful students and thank you to all people involved, mentors and students. With the results of these four projects, we hope that you will be able to write the sheet music you want faster, that you will have more powerful tools at your fingertips, and that MuseScore will be easier to use. MuseScore’s admins and mentors were delighted to be a part of Google Summer of Code this year, and we all hope to have the opportunity to participate in this program again. Thomas, maybe Marc, and I will be attending the GSoC summit at the end of October to share our experience with fellow open source project participants. * What’s a nightly? you might ask. For every new change made to MuseScore code, a new version of MuseScore is created and made available for you to test. Nightlies can be downloaded from the download page and feedback is welcome in the Technology Preview forum [Less]

Semi-Realtime MIDI Demo Part 1: New note entry modes Semi-Realtime MIDI Demo Part 2: Rhythmic Groupings and Voice Separation

Welcome to the first video in a long series on the free MuseScore notation software, brought to you by Dave Conservatoire. The next videos will be unveiled in the days and weeks to come. Enjoy, subscribe and share!

Welcome to the first video in a long series on the free MuseScore notation software, brought to you by Dave Conservatoire. The next videos will be unveiled in the days and weeks to come. Enjoy, subscribe and share!

Part 3 of 3 MuseScore 3.0, currently under development, is on track to be smarter, faster, and easier than any MuseScore you’ve seen before. We’ve previously discussed the first two of those areas of improvement for the next major version of the ... [More] world’s most popular, powerful, and easy-to-use free and open-source scorewriter. This May, we started by introducing you to the ongoing Smart Layout project, working towards making MuseScore 3 smart enough to automatically offset overlapping elements and avoid collisions. In June, we gave you a preview of the speed difference, as we revamp MuseScore’s layout algorithms so score editing is just as fast no matter how big your score is. In this post, we’ll take a look at how the work is going on the last of our three overarching goals: making working with MuseScore 3 easier in various ways. This is, of course, really the ultimate goal of all of the above; the motivation for making MuseScore smarter and faster is to make it easier to work with. When MuseScore is smarter, you won’t have to spend time manually fixing collisions. When MuseScore is faster, well, it will be faster—the advantage is self-evident. So we’ll start with an update on how those efforts are progressing. Smarter The Smart Layout initiative is still a work in progress, but moving fast, as Werner Schweer (the father of MuseScore) implements “smart” handling of one type of element after another. As an example of this gradual refinement, as of today, ottavas (octave lines) are intelligent, and will automatically move up or down as notes, articulations, or dynamics get too close—but for pedal lines, the same hasn’t been implemented yet. With the similarities between pedal lines and ottavas, though, you can bet it will be soon. Faster Most edits are now processed very quickly, independent of score size and number of parts, but some editing functions, including note input, still use the same process as in MuseScore 2, and are still slow in large scores. Resolving this is on the agenda. Easier A whole host of new features and improvements on the side have already been added, or are planned—many of which are specifically aimed at making various stages of the MuseScore workflow easier. Here, in no particular order, are what may be the top ten to look forward to. Real-time MIDI input: This is one major new feature coming along in this area that you may have already heard of. Peter “shoogle” Jonas is working on it over the summer. While interpreting the input accurately is necessarily a challenge to implement (particularly because a human player might not be able to play the rhythm with mathematical precision), this has the potential to save you significant time on note input. Not in the nightly builds yet. Swap Clipboard and Selection: A way to to trade two selections—e.g., exchange the contents of two staves for a time, or change the order of two measures—was first requested in 2012. Four years later, the ideal solution turned out to be one that’s gradually becoming more common, and Jon Enquist joined the community as a first-time contributor with his solution. (This is one that you may get enjoy sooner, in MuseScore 2.0.4.) Custom toolbars: MuseScore 2 allows you to customize palettes, and create different workspaces with different sets of palettes. You can also choose to show and hide various toolbars and drag them around, but the content of each toolbar is locked. In MuseScore 3, thanks to Werner, toolbars will be fully customizable and able to change with workspaces, with preset Basic and Advanced options. So far only the Note Input toolbar is under control, but the framework is there. PDF Copying Assistant: In addition to the experimental online PDF-to-MSCZ converter, MuseScore 3 will be able to recognize the basic structure in a PDF (systems, barlines, line breaks), provide a blank score matching those specifications, and synchronize it visually with the PDF, making it easy to transcribe what you see on the right into the empty measure on the left. Work on this actually began some years ago, but was cancelled before MuseScore 2.0—now new contributor Liang Chen has rebooted the effort. See how it works in this video. Temporary/Cutaway staves: Mentioned in a previous blog post, this falls under the “easier” umbrella of MuseScore 3. This will make it easy to temporarily add another staff to an instrument, or create a one-measure ossia above a staff. Implemented by your friend and mine, Marc Sabatella. System dividers: If you ever wanted to put “//” on the side between systems in MuseScore 2, you had to manually add each one from the Symbols palette and position it by hand. In MuseScore 3, just switch on a style option, and there you are. Marc Sabatella did this as well. Complete shadow notes: When entering notes with the mouse, MuseScore 2 displays a shadow notehead to help you place the note on the staff, but it doesn’t show you the rest of the note. In MuseScore 3, the shadow note is complete with appropriate stem, flag(s), and dot(s), letting you know exactly what you’re about to enter. The first contribution from 19JoHo66. Metric modulation: When you have a time signature change and want the same beat to carry through, that’s commonly notated as something like ♪ = ♩. It’s not easy to create that kind of tempo change in MuseScore 2. In MuseScore 3, metric modulations will be as easy to add as any other tempo, thanks to this summer's synthesizer wizard Johannes "hpfmn" Wegener. New templates for band and percussion: In 2.0.3, the only template under the Band category is Concert Band. In MuseScore 3 (and probably even in 2.0.4), under Band and Percussion, there will be Concert Band, Brass Band, Marching Band, Battery Percussion, Small Pit Percussion, and Large Pit Percussion. Courtesy of variously first-time contributor Henk De Groot, first-time contributor Chris J. “duck57" Matlak, and yours truly, Isaac Weiss. Simpler menus: A few months ago, LibreOffice (an incalculably larger open-source software project) put some effort into making their user interface simpler to navigate, with some thoughtful reorganization of the application menus in LibreOffice 5.1. I took it upon myself to do something similar for MuseScore 3, and I’m very happy with the results. This is a sure guarantee that we’ll get a couple hundred million users, too. Bonus! This was going to be a top ten list, but here's a last-minute addition. Formerly, when you changed MuseScore's language, it was necessary to restart MuseScore to fully translate the interface. Not anymore. Core team member Nicolas "lasconic" Froment committed this change literally one hour ago. Notice how many of these improvements came from first-time contributors—musician/programmers answering the call to help develop MuseScore 3, or “scratching their own itch” and sharing the benefits with the community. In an open-source project, that’s not surprising, but it is really nice to see, and worth pointing out. A hearty congratulations and thank-you to everyone helping take MuseScore to the next level! You can help, too! Please 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. So, there you have it. The MuseScore of tomorrow is being sketched out today. I, for one, can hardly wait. [Less]

Part 3 of 3 MuseScore 3.0, currently under development, is on track to be smarter, faster, and easier than any MuseScore you’ve seen before. We’ve previously discussed the first two of those areas of improvement for the next major version of the ... [More] world’s most popular, powerful, and easy-to-use free and open-source scorewriter. This May, we started by introducing you to the ongoing Smart Layout project, working towards making MuseScore 3 smart enough to automatically offset overlapping elements and avoid collisions. In June, we gave you a preview of the speed difference, as we revamp MuseScore’s layout algorithms so score editing is just as fast no matter how big your score is. In this post, we’ll take a look at how the work is going on the last of our three overarching goals: making working with MuseScore 3 easier in various ways. This is, of course, really the ultimate goal of all of the above; the motivation for making MuseScore smarter and faster is to make it easier to work with. When MuseScore is smarter, you won’t have to spend time manually fixing collisions. When MuseScore is faster, well, it will be faster—the advantage is self-evident. So we’ll start with an update on how those efforts are progressing. Smarter The Smart Layout initiative is still a work in progress, but moving fast, as Werner Schweer (the father of MuseScore) implements “smart” handling of one type of element after another. As an example of this gradual refinement, as of July 1st, ottavas (octave lines) are intelligent, and will automatically move up or down as notes, articulations, or dynamics get too close—but for pedal lines, the same hasn’t been implemented yet. With the similarities between pedal lines and ottavas, though, you can bet it will be soon. Faster Most edits are now processed very quickly, independent of score size and number of parts, but some editing functions, including note input, still use the same process as in MuseScore 2, and are still slow in large scores. Resolving this is on the agenda. Easier A whole host of new features and improvements on the side have already been added, or are planned—many of which are specifically aimed at making various stages of the MuseScore workflow easier. Here, in no particular order, are what may be the top ten to look forward to. Real-time MIDI input: This is one major new feature coming along in this area that you may have already heard of. Peter “shoogle” Jonas is working on it over the summer. While interpreting the input accurately is necessarily a challenge to implement (particularly because a human player might not be able to play the rhythm with mathematical precision), this has the potential to save you significant time on note input. Swap Clipboard and Selection: A way to to trade two selections—e.g., exchange the contents of two staves for a time, or change the order of two measures—was first requested in 2012. Four years later, the ideal solution turned out to be one that’s gradually becoming more common, and Jon Enquist joined the community as a first-time contributor with his solution. (This is one that you may get enjoy sooner, in MuseScore 2.0.4.) Custom toolbars: MuseScore 2 allows you to customize palettes, and create different workspaces with different sets of palettes. You can also choose to show and hide various toolbars and drag them around, but the content of each toolbar is locked. In MuseScore 3, thanks to Werner, toolbars will be fully customizable and able to change with workspaces, with preset Basic and Advanced options. So far only the Note Input toolbar is under control, but the framework is there. PDF Copying Assistant: In addition to the experimental online PDF-to-MSCZ converter, MuseScore 3 will be able to recognize the basic structure in a PDF (systems, barlines, line breaks), provide a blank score matching those specifications, and synchronize it visually with the PDF, making it easy to transcribe what you see on the right into the empty measure on the left. Work on this actually began some years ago, but was cancelled before MuseScore 2.0—now new contributor Liang Chen has rebooted the effort. See how it works in this video. Temporary/Cutaway staves: Mentioned in a previous blog post, this falls under the “easier” umbrella of MuseScore 3. This will make it easy to temporarily add another staff to an instrument, or create a one-measure ossia above a staff. Implemented by your friend and mine, Marc Sabatella. System dividers: If you ever wanted to put “//” on the side between systems in MuseScore 2, you had to manually add each one from the Symbols palette and position it by hand. In MuseScore 3, just switch on a style option, and there you are. Marc Sabatella did this as well. Complete shadow notes: When entering notes with the mouse, MuseScore 2 displays a shadow notehead to help you place the note on the staff, but it doesn’t show you the rest of the note. In MuseScore 3, the shadow note is complete with appropriate stem, flag(s), and dot(s), letting you know exactly what you’re about to enter. The first contribution from 19JoHo66. Metric modulation: When you have a time signature change and want the same beat to carry through, that’s commonly notated as something like ♪ = ♩. It’s not easy to create that kind of tempo change in MuseScore 2. In MuseScore 3, metric modulations will be as easy to add as any other tempo, thanks to this summer's synthesizer wizard Johannes "hpfmn" Wegener. New templates for band and percussion: In 2.0.3, the only template under the Band category is Concert Band. In MuseScore 3 (and probably even in 2.0.4), under Band and Percussion, there will be Concert Band, Brass Band, Marching Band, Battery Percussion, Small Pit Percussion, and Large Pit Percussion. Courtesy of variously first-time contributor Henk De Groot, first-time contributor Chris J. “duck57" Matlak, and yours truly, Isaac Weiss. Simpler menus: A few months ago, LibreOffice (an incalculably larger open-source software project) put some effort into making their user interface simpler to navigate, with some thoughtful reorganization of the application menus in LibreOffice 5.1. I took it upon myself to do something similar for MuseScore 3, and I’m very happy with the results. This is a sure guarantee that we’ll get a couple hundred million users, too. Bonus! This was going to be a top ten list, but here's a last-minute addition. Formerly, when you changed MuseScore's language, it was necessary to restart MuseScore to fully translate the interface. Not anymore. Core team member Nicolas "lasconic" Froment committed this change literally one hour ago. Notice how many of these improvements came from first-time contributors—musician/programmers answering the call to help develop MuseScore 3, or “scratching their own itch” and sharing the benefits with the community. In an open-source project, that’s not surprising, but it is really nice to see, and worth pointing out. A hearty congratulations and thank-you to everyone helping take MuseScore to the next level! You can help, too! Please 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. So, there you have it. The MuseScore of tomorrow is being sketched out today. I, for one, can hardly wait. [Less]

Part 3 of 3 MuseScore 3.0, currently under development, is on track to be smarter, faster, and easier than any MuseScore you’ve seen before. We’ve previously discussed the first two of those areas of improvement for the next major version of the ... [More] world’s most popular, powerful, and easy-to-use free and open-source scorewriter. This May, we started by introducing you to the ongoing Smart Layout project, working towards making MuseScore 3 smart enough to automatically offset overlapping elements and avoid collisions. In June, we gave you a preview of the speed difference, as we revamp MuseScore’s layout algorithms so score editing is just as fast no matter how big your score is. In this post, we’ll take a look at how the work is going on the last of our three overarching goals: making working with MuseScore 3 easier in various ways. This is, of course, really the ultimate goal of all of the above; the motivation for making MuseScore smarter and faster is to make it easier to work with. When MuseScore is smarter, you won’t have to spend time manually fixing collisions. When MuseScore is faster, well, it will be faster—the advantage is self-evident. So we’ll start with an update on how those efforts are progressing. Smarter The Smart Layout initiative is still a work in progress, but moving fast, as Werner Schweer (the father of MuseScore) implements “smart” handling of one type of element after another. As an example of this gradual refinement, as of July 1st, ottavas (octave lines) are intelligent, and will automatically move up or down as notes, articulations, or dynamics get too close—but for pedal lines, the same hasn’t been implemented yet. With the similarities between pedal lines and ottavas, though, you can bet it will be soon. Faster Most edits are now processed very quickly, independent of score size and number of parts, but some editing functions, including note input, still use the same process as in MuseScore 2, and are still slow in large scores. Resolving this is on the agenda. Easier A whole host of new features and improvements on the side have already been added, or are planned—many of which are specifically aimed at making various stages of the MuseScore workflow easier. Here, in no particular order, are what may be the top ten to look forward to. Real-time MIDI input: This is one major new feature coming along in this area that you may have already heard of. Peter “shoogle” Jonas is working on it over the summer. While interpreting the input accurately is necessarily a challenge to implement (particularly because a human player might not be able to play the rhythm with mathematical precision), this has the potential to save you significant time on note input. Not in the nightly builds yet. Swap Clipboard and Selection: A way to to trade two selections—e.g., exchange the contents of two staves for a time, or change the order of two measures—was first requested in 2012. Four years later, the ideal solution turned out to be one that’s gradually becoming more common, and Jon Enquist joined the community as a first-time contributor with his solution. (This is one that you may get enjoy sooner, in MuseScore 2.0.4.) Custom toolbars: MuseScore 2 allows you to customize palettes, and create different workspaces with different sets of palettes. You can also choose to show and hide various toolbars and drag them around, but the content of each toolbar is locked. In MuseScore 3, thanks to Werner, toolbars will be fully customizable and able to change with workspaces, with preset Basic and Advanced options. So far only the Note Input toolbar is under control, but the framework is there. PDF Copying Assistant: In addition to the experimental online PDF-to-MSCZ converter, MuseScore 3 will be able to recognize the basic structure in a PDF (systems, barlines, line breaks), provide a blank score matching those specifications, and synchronize it visually with the PDF, making it easy to transcribe what you see on the right into the empty measure on the left. Work on this actually began some years ago, but was cancelled before MuseScore 2.0—now new contributor Liang Chen has rebooted the effort. See how it works in this video. Temporary/Cutaway staves: Mentioned in a previous blog post, this falls under the “easier” umbrella of MuseScore 3. This will make it easy to temporarily add another staff to an instrument, or create a one-measure ossia above a staff. Implemented by your friend and mine, Marc Sabatella. System dividers: If you ever wanted to put “//” on the side between systems in MuseScore 2, you had to manually add each one from the Symbols palette and position it by hand. In MuseScore 3, just switch on a style option, and there you are. Marc Sabatella did this as well. Complete shadow notes: When entering notes with the mouse, MuseScore 2 displays a shadow notehead to help you place the note on the staff, but it doesn’t show you the rest of the note. In MuseScore 3, the shadow note is complete with appropriate stem, flag(s), and dot(s), letting you know exactly what you’re about to enter. The first contribution from 19JoHo66. Metric modulation: When you have a time signature change and want the same beat to carry through, that’s commonly notated as something like ♪ = ♩. It’s not easy to create that kind of tempo change in MuseScore 2. In MuseScore 3, metric modulations will be as easy to add as any other tempo, thanks to this summer's synthesizer wizard Johannes "hpfmn" Wegener. New templates for band and percussion: In 2.0.3, the only template under the Band category is Concert Band. In MuseScore 3 (and probably even in 2.0.4), under Band and Percussion, there will be Concert Band, Brass Band, Marching Band, Battery Percussion, Small Pit Percussion, and Large Pit Percussion. Courtesy of variously first-time contributor Henk De Groot, first-time contributor Chris J. “duck57" Matlak, and yours truly, Isaac Weiss. Simpler menus: A few months ago, LibreOffice (an incalculably larger open-source software project) put some effort into making their user interface simpler to navigate, with some thoughtful reorganization of the application menus in LibreOffice 5.1. I took it upon myself to do something similar for MuseScore 3, and I’m very happy with the results. This is a sure guarantee that we’ll get a couple hundred million users, too. Bonus! This was going to be a top ten list, but here's a last-minute addition. Formerly, when you changed MuseScore's language, it was necessary to restart MuseScore to fully translate the interface. Not anymore. Core team member Nicolas "lasconic" Froment committed this change literally one hour ago. Notice how many of these improvements came from first-time contributors—musician/programmers answering the call to help develop MuseScore 3, or “scratching their own itch” and sharing the benefits with the community. In an open-source project, that’s not surprising, but it is really nice to see, and worth pointing out. A hearty congratulations and thank-you to everyone helping take MuseScore to the next level! You can help, too! Please 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. So, there you have it. The MuseScore of tomorrow is being sketched out today. I, for one, can hardly wait. [Less]