4.4.4 - Mitigation of corrupted scores

Hi everyone! You may have heard already that MuseScore 4.4.4 has been officially released. :) One of the improvements it brings is a serious attempt to mitigate the issue with corrupted saved files. This is not about the corruption where suddenly there are incomplete measures. Rather it is about the saved files becoming zero bytes long or full of zeros or garbage data which makes them practically unusable.

Here is how this mitigation works. On each save, MuseScore Studio 4.4.4+ will check the saved file for corruption. If the file turns out corrupted, you will see the following dialog as soon as you save:

If you encounter this dialog, follow these steps:
1. The very first step is finding the latest score backup created by MSS and making a copy of it! This is described for example here: https://musescore.org/en/node/52116

2. Click the "Try again" button on the dialog once. If the dialog reappears, click this button a few more times.

3. If after clicking "Try again" one or more times the dialog does not reappear, this means your score was saved successfully and you can continue working normally.

4. If after clicking "Try again" several times, the dialog won't go away, try clicking the "Save as..." button and saving to a different location - a different folder or even a different drive if you have one.

5. If the dialog disappears, you can continue working in MuseScore Studio normally but now your score is located in another location. The score at the oiginal location is corrupted and unusable so you may want to replace it with the file from the new (Save as) location.

6. If the dialog keeps popping up even when clicking the "Save as..." button and selecting various save locations, click the "Save as..." button again and follow the next steps.

7. On the Save As dialog, in "Save as type" select "Uncompressed MuseScore folder (experimental)".

8. In the "File name" text field, change .mscz at the end to .mscx (so z becomes x) and put the whole name in double quotes. For example, if the text field was populated with bach_784.mscz, change it to "bach_784.mscx" - note the double quotes and the z became x.

9. In the folder list section of the Save as dialog, create a new folder and name it anything you want, but ideally give it the same name as your original score, in our example bach_784 (without the .mscz extension).

10. Press the Save button.

11. In File Explorer for your OS go to the folder you created at step 9 and open it (enter in it).

12. Select all files in the folder, right-click them and zip them to a .zip file. There are many zip programs that can do this like 7-Zip, IZarc, etc., even the OS will likely be able to do it. The following screenshot shows an example with 7-Zip:

13. Rename the zip file to have the name of your original score if it is different, e.g. bach_784.mscz in our case.

14. Try to open the file in MuseScore Studio. If it opens fine, you can continue working with it. You can also copy it over the original bach_784.mscz file and open it from there.

If these steps don't not work at all or do not work as described, let us know. In the worst case, you should be able to open the backup file (see step 1) and continue with it losing your latest changes.

It is important to understand that if you click Cancel on the dialog, your changes won't be saved and your score file will be corrupted at this point.

If you go through all the steps and don't mind sharing the score file created at step 13 with us, please do so so we can examine it.

Keep us informed here about which step worked for you. Did clicking the "Try again" button fix it for you? How many times did you have to click it? Does "Try again" fix it every time a corruption happens? Anything you can share with us will be greatly appreciated.

We'll be refining this info over time as we receive your input.
Thank you all! :)
Enjoy MSS 4.4.4!