Filed under: Audio, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Open Source, Beta
MuseScore: the Free and Open Source Music Notation Application
by Nik Fletcher Apr 2nd 2009 at 11:00AM
If you've ever ventured into the world of music notation, you'll know that to produce musical scores there's normally a large amount of expense involved to pick up the relevant application (either Sibelius - my favoured application - or Finale).That's not an ideal situation if you're short of the (hundreds of) dollars required to grab a licence, and whilst the developers of Sibelius and Finale both offer reduced-priced, lesser-featured versions of their applications, wouldn't it be great if the open source community were able to lend a hand much as GIMP has for people unable to afford Photoshop
That's where Musescore fits in. An open-source notation app, it offers all the features you need such as transposition, part extraction and much more - for the super-awesome price of free! Throw in the reading and saving of MusicXML documents which enable you to move scores between any of the major notation apps, and MuseScore - when it eventually finds its way to 1.0 - looks as though it'll be absolutely ideal for anyone looking to notate their next hit song, or write for a symphony orchestra near you.
Right now, an early version of Musescore (0.9.4) is only available for Windows and Linux, though work on a Mac version is in development.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Chris A said 11:59AM on 4-02-2009
I tried this program briefly. I was not able to have it play more then one voice at a time. did you get the same result?
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lasconic said 6:06PM on 4-02-2009
You need to use a soundfont to have all voices. Hopefully midi output will be added soon.
dom said 12:24PM on 4-02-2009
i like Rosegarden www.rosegardenmusic.com
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KeegdnaB said 1:30PM on 4-02-2009
I've been using this in Ubuntu for awhile since I can't get finale to run properly in Wine. I haven't used it in Windows (due to having Finale) but maybe I'll see how well it works.
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Zack said 3:28PM on 4-02-2009
I tried this as well, but I had a lot of problems getting it to do what I wanted. It just doesn't compete with Finale at this point. Maybe with some more development, it can, but not yet.
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lasconic said 6:11PM on 4-02-2009
I guess MuseScore is not yet competing with the full version of Finale. But at least, it can compete with Finale NotePad. Take a look to the comparison here: http://www.musescore.org/en/blog/2008/09/07/comparing-musescore-and-finale-notepad-feature-feature
captbaritone said 8:14PM on 4-02-2009
If you are looking to typeset music, I highly recommend Lilypond it is open source and does a much better job than either Final or Sibelious.
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Jason said 9:06PM on 4-21-2009
This does not import MIDI files which makes it fairly worthless for me.
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qaadle said 3:58PM on 5-22-2009
It.s pest ever
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