Ideas 2015

Update March 2nd: Unfortunately MuseScore was not accepted for the 2015 edition of GSoC. We'll try again next year!

Your proposal

We strongly believe that the best proposal for you is the one you'll do. If you have any suggestions, come onto the IRC channel #musescore on freenode.net, or contact us on the developer mailing list.

Also check ideas from previous years

Copy paste an idea below and change the text with your new idea for GSoC 2015

Virtual singer

Several users have requested a virtual singer in MuseScore. This feature would make MuseScore sing the lyrics in a score. It's useful for singers in choirs who like to rehearse with actual synthesized lyrics.

There are several specialized (open source) software projects and libraries which do "sing synthesis".

• See this message on the developer mailing list with several interesting links
• Harmony Assistant has a virtual singer plugin
• Vocaloid. The software is very popular in Japan, where one of the voices of the software and the virtual character on the software box, Hatsune Miku, has even made large concerts.
• A free competitor is Utau. The license of UTAU is unclear to me.
• On the same topic, see Cadencii, Aquestone VSTi, Cantor2, Realitone Blue
• WORLD seems to be a good open source start
• Festival, the open source text to speech engine has a singing mode. See also this
• Flite and Flinger based on Festival
• An attempt using a now closed web API named Canoris and MuseScore
• Sinsy, an open source MusicXML to singing voice converter, working only for Japanese.

An external tool that could process a MIDI, or MusicXML file created by MuseScore and make an audio file would be good for singers to practise along.

• Difficulty: Hard
• Skills: C++/Qt
• Possible mentor: Nicolas Froment (@lasconic)

Explorer/Finder plugins to display scores information

MuseScore 2.0 now saves a thumbnail of the first page in the MSCZ file. A plugin for the different OS file explorer (Windows, Mac OS X, others) could use this thumbnail and maybe other metadata to make the display of scores better looking.

• Difficulty: Medium
• Skills: C++ ?
• Possible mentor: Nicolas Froment (@lasconic)

Context-sensitive help

Learning how to use MuseScore can be pretty challenging. A way to lower the barrier is by adding a context-sensitive help system which works in two ways. One way is to directly obtain explanatory information about any widget you come across in the UI. The other way is to perform a keyword search which directly jumps you straight where you need to be in the UI. Mac OS offers a Spotlight For Help search field,, but not only does this need to work for all platforms and it also needs to work for the menu, toolbars, popup and docked windows and the palette.

• Difficulty: Medium
• Skills: Qt
• Possible mentor: Werner Schweer

OMR

Many users use MuseScore to transcribe scores from paper. This project would be about aiding this use case by providing a side-by-side view of the digital score and a scanned score. A very limited implementation of this project (see screencast) has already been coded (see github) but much more work is needed to make it ready for general usage.

• Difficulty: Hard
• Skills: Qt
• Possible mentor: Werner Schweer

Timeline

When a score is growing, it's sometimes hard to know where you are located in the score, which part you worked on already etc... The idea would be to create a new panel, potentially to replace the navigator, which gives an abstract view of the score, showing squares for each measure on each instrument, with a different color if the measure is empty or not. Potentially, having one row for rehearsal mark, for tempo markings, time signatures, key signatures etc...

• Difficulty:Medium to Hard
• Skills: Qt
• Possible mentor: ...

Keyboard layout and shortcut management

Many shortcuts in MuseScore do have conflicts due to different international keyboard layouts. Example of such a conflict can be found with the French keyboard. To solve this problem, MuseScore needs a system which can detect the client keyboard layout and auto select the appropriate shortcut list. The developer challenge is to make this work for all international keyboard and if needed create for each of them a custom shortcut list. Additional challenges are the differences between Mac OS X and Windows/Linux. See #47361: [Mac OS X] Insert measure keyboard shortcut doesn't exist
More related issue:
* http://musescore.org/en/node/48846

• Difficulty: Medium
• Skills: Qt
• Possible mentor: ...

Chord symbols playback

It's currently possible to add chord symbols on top of a staff in MuseScore. These symbols are ignored on playback. It's a frequent feature request to be able to realize these chord symbols as notes in a staff or to optionally "play" the symbols while listening the score. A simple implementation would just play the chord for the whole duration of the measure or until the next chord symbols.

• Difficulty: Easy - Medium
• Skills: Qt
• Possible mentor: Marc Sabatella