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MuseScore 2.0 Released
rDouglass writes: MuseScore, the open source desktop application for music notation, has released version 2.0 for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. This release represents the culmination of four years of development, including technical contributions from over 400 people. In addition to a completely new UI, top features include linked parts (good for pieces with many instruments), guitar tablature, flexible chord symbols, and fret diagrams. The program integrates directly with the MuseScore.com online library of scores, and music written with the application can be displayed and played using the MuseScore mobile app.
I don't know that it's really any more obscure than 3D modelling, desktop publishing, or any of the many other projects that get discussed on /. For those of us who work or dabble in music areas and appreciate being able FOSS MuseScore is really amazing software. It's also important for the education market where commercial software in the same genre can be very expensive. 1.x definitely has it's quirks but it's amazing (and important) to be able to at least compete on a basic level with Finale and Sibelius. I'm looking forward to trying out 2.0!
MuseScore is one of the most important open source applications installed on my computer. I have nothing but respect for the people who've developed it. They were also the people behind the phenomenal Wikifonia website, which aggregated crowd-sourced musical scores, and single-handedly kept the Great American Songbook vital and allowed thousands of young jazz musicians to access online, transposable scores of hundreds of jazz standards until it was forced off the air by music publishers and Hal Leonard. Luckily, some kind soul in Belgium rar'd the entire archive of Wikifonia and smuggled it out to a guy I know via Mega and that great resource for musicians still exists (and can be found at the Wikifonia fan page at Facebook, but you'll have to dig a bit). Until Wikifonia, musicians had to tote around poorly-transcribed sheets or Real Books with ugly calligraphy.
I use MuseScore every single day and it's every bit the equal of any of the expensive music score programs like Sibelius or Finale. If you are a musician or composer or use musical manuscripts, I highly recommend MuseScore. There are plugins that will do everything from providing tools to people who score films like me or just someone who wants to covert sheet music into harmonica, guitar or uke tabs. Laying out everything from a simple lead sheet to an orchestral score is a pure joy using MuseScore, and if you know a little bit about how musical manuscripts work, the learning curve is not bad at all.
I don't know any of these people personally, but if any of the MuseScore team see this, I want to thank you for your work. I've contributed what money I can to the project, but I want you to know how much your work has enriched my life.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You can use MuseScore to convert sheet music or midi files into guitar tab, if you're interested. You have to use plugins which are readily available from the MuseScore community.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A very hearty second. MuseScore has always been a very capable, easy-to-learn score editor. Looking over the new features, it looks like the developers are keeping that focus on functionality and usability, and aren't just larding on more stuff -- or even worse, ruining the app by changing the entire look and feel "just because". (Oh, how I hate the flat icon look. It actively makes it harder to see what you're doing. They have essentially made it impossible to classify things by sight, because you can't individuate anymore. Bah.)
I made the switch to MuseScore several years ago, and everything I've written down was done with this fine tool. Looking forward to 2.0.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Time to make a donation. It's not really about the application, but what it enables. The sharing of free music scores and transcriptions, enabling a vibrant community of music sharing.
While I respect publishing rights for official scores, the fact is that there is a great set of transcriptions out there. This just helps the community at large.
The automatic formatting of LilyPond is much better. The workflow is similar to TeX: you write content in a text format and mark it up, and the software takes care of the rest. The quality LilyPond can achieve is very good. With MuseScore, though the visual interface is more comfortable for many and has a smaller learning curve, there's far too much manual adjustment necessary in scores of reasonable complexity, and usually has to be done again when a piece is modified. It's possible to get the best of both though, by importing a MuseScore into Denemo, which uses LilyPond for typesetting. Some examples here show the difference, compared to using MuseScore alone.
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