News

This past Sunday, open source developers and users all over the world gathered in Brussels for FOSDEM 2009. For the first time ever, also MuseScore developers and users came together. The meet and greet was arranged on Sunday around 14 pm, which was around the time that MuseScore was presented in a so called lightning talk.

The talk was limited to 15 minutes, just enough to pitch MuseScore to the room of around 100 people. I didn't count

MuseScore 0.9.4 is available for download at http://musescore.org/en/download.

Top new features: improvements to note selection and copy-paste, automatic scrolling during playback, more languages, improvements to drum input, MIDI keyboard support on Windows (Linux version already supported this), about 30 crashes fixed.

Playback

• Automatic scrolling during playback
• Increased note length during playback so that normal notes no longer sound semi-staccato
  • MIDI excerpt from [attachment:promenade-0-9-4.mid=Promenade (MuseScore 0.9.4)]
  • MIDI excerpt from [attachment:promenade-0-9-3.mid=Promenade (MuseScore 0.9.3)]
• When playback reaches the end of the piece

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Werner Schweer added experimental support for multi-measure rests on 20 December. Multi-measure rests are an important requirement for ensemble sheet music and a frequent feature request.

[inline:multimeasure-rests.png=Screenshot of multi-measure rests in MuseScore]

At the time of this writing the implementation is incomplete but basic support for multi-measure rests is working in revision 1384 or later. Prereleases for 0.9.4 are available for testing on Windows or Linux.

Instructions for multi-measure rests:

1. From the menu choose Style → Edit Style
2. Click on

Update April 2nd: The first MuseScore alpha release for Mac is available for download

Update March 19th: Effort to get sound working in the Mac release. More info in this topic on the mailing list

Update March 14th: Mac release font issue fixed. Read more on the mailing list

Joachim Ganseman built a "skeleton" version of MuseScore for Mac OS on 2 December. Ganseman warns that the version is "certainly not ready for publication" but an important step towards a

By the end of September 2008, MuseScore version 0.9.3 was released to the public together with a brand new website. One month later, it looks like the MuseScore project has experienced it's first tipping point. It's time for some number crunching.

The SourceForge download statistics are revealing that MuseScore has been downloaded almost 10.000 times in October. Also worth mentioning, is the fact that MuseScore has been downloaded in almost 100 countries worldwide. The top 10 looks as followed:

Dear all,

I have now finalised the svn update automation system for my official
packages, and consequently Ubuntu preview packages are available. The
current revision is r1229, and it is, at the time of going to press,
only available for Ubuntu 8.10: (the main repository for) 8.04 does
not contain a recent enough version of Qt4. I am working to upload a
new Qt4 as I write.

The packages are built identically to those found in the Ubuntu and
Debian

The new MuseScore release 0.9.3 is out and ready for download!

MuseScore 0.9.3 implements a new compressed file format (*.mscz), adds a lot of other new features, fixes some bugs and tries to speedup/optimize layout. The script plugin interface has now bindings to the whole qt library. New score elements are glissando and tremolo symbols between notes. Tuplet types are extended and can now contain notes and rests of different len. A detailed changelog can be found here.

MakeMusic announced 1 day ago the that their Finale Notepad version of the Finale suite, will get complete MusicXML support in the upcoming 2009 release. This interesting news comes however with a price tag. From now on Finale Notepad will cost $10. So, is there a free alternative? Yes there is: MuseScore

A quote from the Finale Notepad press release:

A rather interesting business decision from MakeMusic since many Notepad users might flock away and perhaps check

Today Recordare LLC announced a new update of the Dolet 4 plugin for Sibelius which offers the ability to export musicXML 2.0 files. It is noteworthy to say that some of the knowhow to add MusicXML support for chord names in MuseScore, has been used for the development of the Dolet plugin as well.

This is just one of the indications that MuseScore has really good build in MusicXML support. But there are more indications as well.

1. Exporting your