MuseScore

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.

MuseScore can also play back scores through the built-in sequencer and SoundFont sample library. 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.

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. 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, and PNG formats, or it can be printed directly.

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.

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. The app can play scores, and allows changing of transposition and part extraction, but does not allow creating or editing scores. 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. 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. 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. 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.

(At the end of 2013, the project moved from SourceForge to GitHub, and continuous 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, and in December 2016 the project stated that version 2.0.3 had been downloaded 1.9 million times in the nine months since its release.)

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.

Prerelease

MuseScore 1

MuseScore 2

MuseScore 3

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

Development

MuseScore is free and open-source and is written mainly in C++, with the graphical user interface making use of the cross-platform Qt toolkit. Werner Schweer, Nicolas Froment and Thomas Bonte are the full-time and lead developers of the project, with a wider community also contributing. Google Summer of Code has sponsored students to help develop MuseScore in 2013, 2014, 2016, and 2017. The development of MuseScore takes place on GitHub.

Adoption

MuseScore reports over 7,000 downloads per day as of 2016. Many Linux distributions also include MuseScore in their software libraries, such as in the Ubuntu Software Center. MuseScore was also included in the VALO-CD collection, which provides free software for Windows.

Many educational institutions also make use of MuseScore, including Drew University and the Ionian University. 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.

Open Goldberg Variations

In 2011, MuseScore launched a Kickstarter campaign to create high-quality, freely available digital score and audio versions of the Goldberg Variations. The process influenced the development of MuseScore 2, with notation improvements needed in order to create a high-quality engraving of the variations. With the fundraising goal met, MuseScore developers, pianist Kimiko Ishizaka, and crowd-sourced reviewers collaborated to create an engraved score and also record a new album, both of which were released under a Creative Commons Zero license (without copyright), meaning they can be downloaded and shared freely. In 2012, at the end of the online public review process, the final engraved score was released for free on MuseScore.com, and printed and bound by GRIN in Germany. Kimiko Ishizaka's recording was released for free on BandCamp.

Open Well-Tempered Clavier

In 2013, a second successful Kickstarter funded the creation of a new edition of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Once again, the score underwent public review on MuseScore.com, and was recorded by Kimiko Ishizaka, with both score and recordings released into the public domain in 2015.

Braille editions

After hearing from a blind musician who contributed to the Open WTC Kickstarter, MuseScore set up new stretch funding goals to support making music notation more accessible to blind and visually impaired musicians. Though the top goal of automatically converting all scores in the MuseScore.com library to Braille was not funded, they did get funding to create Braille sheet music for both the Goldberg Variations and the Well-Tempered Clavier. The digital files (for Braille terminal) are available for free download, like the standard scores.