Musescore Music Notation

If there is one area where computers and music can really work together, it is musical typesetting. My handwriting is terrible and when I try to write out music, either practice scales for my students, or charts for the band, it is much better when it is typeset. I have been looking for something to use for a while and have been avoiding laying out the money for Finale or Sibelius. That being said, I am a big fan of open source software. So when I found Musescore, still in a beta form, but already very usable, I was very interested.

Musescore is now in it's 1.0 version and is coming along fast! It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It currently works well for typesetting standard notation, with support for unlimited staves, 4 voices per stave. It allows for MIDI input and playback. There is great chord name support with chord names that can be transposed with your music. Of course it contains menus full of barline types, note head types, text options,  fingerings, articulations, dynamics, etc. Here is something silly I whipped up for this post in a matter of a couple minutes.
This was a 'save as png'. It was exported at 300 dpi (I resized it) with a transparent background which is nice.The dpi  is selectable in the options menu. Other export types include: PDF, png, svg, postscript, lilypond, MIDI, wav, ogg, flac and MusicXML. So it is pretty versatile in output formats.

Keyboard shortcuts are user definable (which could be handy if you are coming from other software).

Musescore also has a plugin engine that I have not even looked at yet. It has several included plugins for doing various tasks, but since the plugins are written in Javascript, it should be pretty easy to mess with.

There are a few UI issues that are still being hashed out by the developers, but I have found the forums on their site to be extremely friendly and Bug reports are actually looked at and when possible fixed in the source code.

Future Features:


One thing that the current stable version lacks is support for guitar TAB and guitar block chord symbols, but since it is open source, I download and compile a development 'snapshot' daily and support for these features has already been coded and the bugs are being worked out. Not only for guitar, but TAB support for any amount of strings and tunings, with many built in and user definable TAB staffs as well.  I expect we will see these in a stable version soon. It seems like they try to release a new version every 3-4 months, so since 1.0 came out last month, a new updated version shouldn't be too far away.

Overall, I am very glad I found Musescore. It has a great future ahead of it.

You can download Musescore for free at http://musescore.org

Are you using Musescore? What are you doing with it? Let us know, we would love to hear.