MuseScore 0.9.6 RC1 available for download

MuseScore 0.9.6 Release Candidate 1 is available for download. Packages are available for Windows and MacOS. As soon as there are Linux packages available, we will leave a comment to this post. As always, backup your work and uninstall your current MuseScore installation before installing RC1.

It has been little more than two months, since the release of MuseScore 0.9.6 beta 2. Seems like a lot of time, but that doesn't mean there wasn't any activity. On the contrary. Over the past 8 weeks, David has been filling the issue tracker with a series of critical 0.9.6 regressions which were pretty challenging to fix. The issue tracker does not always show the time and effort that Werner and Lasconic put into fixing these issues. But at last, now we can all enjoy the result. So download RC1, test it and if you find a bug, don't hesitate to report it in the issue tracker.

What has changed?

• The focus for the past weeks was to improve stability and fix as many bugs and crashes as possible. Besides that, improvements were made to the MuseScore code, the plugin framework, import & export and more.
• This RC1 contains the translations coming from the translation server and one new language has been added: Simplified Chinese. Also the pdf handbooks have been updated, including two new ones Japanese and Simplified Chinese handbook. A big thumbs up to all translators.
• The 0.9.6 Release Candidate looks different with the new wordmark being integrated. This includes a new splash screen, a new default background image and various tweaks.

But wait, there is more!

Those who follow MuseScore on Twitter or Facebook, may have read the news already that we won the first prize at Music Hack Day Amsterdam. We won the hack day with a mashup of an online MuseScore player together with the SoundCloud player. You can check out the demo here and watch the presentation which also features another mashup between MuseScore and YouTube.

What you see in the demo and the presentation, is a first trial of making MuseScore more social and connecting it with the internet. In order to make this happen, Werner, Nicolas and myself are working on a new website musescore.com. In the Release Candidate the File menu contains a "Save Online..." option (see picture). Saving your scores to your account on musescore.com will be as easy as one click and from there, you will be able to share your scores with the world in a similar way as we all share our videos, photos and music on the internet nowadays.

Sharing your scores today is not be possible yet, since musescore.com is still in development. We will be gradually accepting people on musescore.com in the coming months. If you wish to be one of the early users of the website, sign up for an invitation.