MuseScore 3.6 Beta Is Out!

• Dec 15, 2020 - 18:39

MuseScore 3.6 Beta is Out!

We are pleased to announce the beta release of MuseScore 3.6, the largest (and last) of our updates to version 3. This is our 'engraving release', which addresses many of the biggest issues affecting the layout and appearance of your sheet music and is the result of a massive collaboration between our community and internal team. It is the first big step towards the type of world-beating engraving capability that we aim to achieve in the future.

Two of the most notable additions in this release are Leland, our new notation font and Edwin, our new typeface. Leland is a highly sophisticated notation style created by our head of product, Martin Keary and our engraving expert, Simon Smith. The aim of Leland is to provide a classic notation style that feels 'just right' with a balanced, consistent weight and a finessed appearance that avoids overly stylised quirks. We will be releasing a video about how (and why) Leland was created to coincide with the official launch of 3.6. Our new typeface, Edwin, is based on New Century Schoolbook, which has long been the typeface of choice by some of the world's leading publishers, chosen specifically as a complimentary companion to Leland. In addition, we have provided new default style settings (margins, line thickness, etc) to compliment Leland and Edwin, which match conventions used by the world's leading publishing houses.

Equally as important as our new notation style is our new vertical layout system. This is switched on by default for new scores and can be activated on older scores too. It is a gigantic improvement to how staves are vertically arranged and will save you hours of work by significantly reducing your reliance on vertical spacers and manual adjustment. We have also created a system for automatically organising the instruments on your score to conform with a range of common conventions (orchestral, marching band, etc.). In addition, newly created scores will also be accurately bracketed by default. You can even specify soloists, which will be arranged and bracketed according to your chosen convention too! These three new systems are the result of a wonderful collaboration between Simon Smith and our community member, Niek van den Berg.

We have also greatly improved how we display the notation fonts: Emmentaler and Bravura, which more accurately match the intentions of the original designers and have included a new jazz font called 'Petaluma' designed by Anthony Hughes at Steinberg.

Lastly, we have made some very useful improvements to our export process, which now includes a new dialog containing lots of practical, time-saving settings. This work was implemented by one of our newest community members, Casper Jeukendrup.

We have lots more to do to improve the engraving capabilities of MuseScore, including important overhauls to our horizontal spacing and beaming systems. MuseScore 3.6 may be a massive step but there are many more steps ahead!

You can install the 3.6 beta version alongside the version you have currently installed. Please be aware that we have disabled uploads to MuseScore.com for this beta release. This is a necessary precaution due to the significant alterations made to engraving and score organisation. It will be enabled for the official stable release of MuseScore 3.6

Additional Engraving fixes

  • Overhauled style defaults, both general and Leland-specific
  • Added feature to indent initial systems of sections
  • Improved adjustment of stem lengths on chords outside the stave
  • Improvement to the appearance of tremolo and buzzrolls markings
  • Correct interpretation of beam spacing and ledger length settings in SMuFL fonts
  • Improved positioning of flags, honouring their orientation and design in their respective fonts
  • Bracketed accidentals can how have customisable padding inside their parentheses
  • Improvements to placement and spacing of accidentals with regard to ledger lines
  • Improvements with spacing involving invisible items

Known Issues

  • Uploads to MuseScore.com have been disabled. The will be enabled again for the official stable release of 3.6
  • Ledger lines will be too long in scores imported from v.2 or earlier (even if the new Leland style is applied); this setting will need to be adjusted manually
  • Braces sometimes have incorrect or inconsistent offset from beginning of staves

See also the handbook page for the new changes and features

Full release notes are available here

Download MuseScore 3.6 Beta

Windows 64-bit Windows 32-bit macOS 10.10 or higher Linux AppImage
(64-bit only)

Comments

• Dec 17, 2020 - 17:02

Thank you for all your hard work!

I don't mean to be a pain but we are sill waiting for a decent way to do a 2-measure (and 4-measure) repeat sign with playback without the shenanigans in this post...
https://musescore.org/en/node/103336

Can you guys commit to it, even if it's sometime in the future?

Once again, thank you and keep up the good work!

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• Dec 23, 2020 - 13:36

C'est vraiment bien, mais !
Pourquoi ne peut-on pas, comme sur MuseScore 2, utiliser les raccourcis Ctrl + Chiffre pour réaliser très vite une division irrégulière ?
Aussi, pourquoi le menu de gauche est-il si sensible et bouge très fort alors qu'on veut juste descendre ou monter un petit peu ?
C'est un peu agaçant malheureusement et c'est pourquoi je continue de travailler sur MS2...

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• Dec 24, 2020 - 15:14

hm musescore noob question, I tried 3.6 all working but an plugin that I made disapear should I have saved it before ? hahaha I can redo it was just like 5 - 6 lines of code

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• Dec 24, 2020 - 16:59

Or, go to Edit / Preferences / General to change where the beta looks for things. You'll see it is also looking in MuseScre3Development for other things - this is to help keep the beta from interfering with a normal installation. But it's actually harmless to change the settings there to point to the regular MsueScore3 folders if you prefer.

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• Dec 27, 2020 - 04:03

Hey friends, I figured I'd try to help out and test the beta out in my own way. I'm not sure if there's a specific thread for issues being found, - and if there is, feel free to link it - but in the interim I'll just post some things I find here. I'm loving most of it so far, especially the new jazz font, however, I'm having an issue where final barlines just appear in random spots in different parts. I've included a screenshot of one such occurrence in a piano part of a chart I'm working on. Hope this helps a bit!

Attachment Size
finalbarline.png 11.14 KB

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• Dec 30, 2020 - 22:07

I see what you mean, I will bring that up!

But - how are you adding these? There are a number of different places accidentals can be found in a font, but I generally recommend using the SMuFL codepoints. If those are chord symbols, this happens automatically when you type "x" or "bb". For plain text, you can use Special Characters palette, which gives you access to the various different locations, and you'll find the SMuFL versions in the Musical Symbols tab.

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• Dec 31, 2020 - 15:52

If enter 'x' or 'bb' in Chords, the program automatically converts it to  𝄪 or 𝄫. The problem is that Edwin fonts do not have  𝄪 and 𝄫 glyphs, so they are displayed in different fonts.
To solve this problem, need to add double sharp and double flat glyphs to the Edwin font, or set it to display SMuFL symbols when entering code.

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• Dec 31, 2020 - 16:59

I think see what you mean, typing "x" works in that you do get a double-sharp sign, but it's not the same double sharp sign as you see in the music itself. That double-sharp sign doesn't come from Edwin; it comes from Leland, or whatever your score font happens to be. So in general there is probably no way to guarantee they will match, but hopefully the proposed change will at least make Edwin and Leland look consistent since those are the defaults.

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