MuseScore 2.0.2 is released, what's next?

• Jul 20, 2015 - 15:33

We released MuseScore 2.0.2 end of last week. You can read the full announcement here. Thank you to anyone involved!

MuseScore 2.1 and development

Marc Sabatella is currently leading an effort to make a roadmap for MuseScore 2.1
If you work or want to work on something not in the roadmap, feel free to comment on the tech preview forum, the developer mailing list or on IRC #musescore on freenode.net.

We'll keep on using the master branch for development. The nightlies for Windows and Mac are now using the master branch. Of course, it means that the nightlies will again become quite unstable, so I would refrain from advising users on the forum to use them without a lot of precaution. Also note that the file format changed in the nightlies/master branch, it's now 2.07 and so MuseScore 2.0.X will not open these files without a warning and, eventually, a crash depending on the features used in the score.

Do we make a 2.0.3 release?

"Never say never"... But these bugfix releases have really been time consuming for developers. As we want 2.1 ready as soon as possible, I believe it would be better to focus on 2.1. Of course, if we find anything big and easy to fix, a 2.0.3 version is not out of the question but it wouldn't be as large as 2.0.1 or 2.0.2.


Comments

I definitely concur! I now have an installation of 2.0.2 (self-built) on my main machine and plan to keep it until there is another official release. I will use 2.0.2 for all my "real" work for the reasons stated, even while continuing to build and test development versions.

Regarding the roadmap: I am open to suggestions on how it should be organized. Right now it is just a big list of ideas organized by topic but with no prioritization or any means of associating ideas with people who will work on them. Some of these have existing feature requests in the issue tracker, and eventually I guess some of the rest could be filed there as well, but I'm not planning on just going through and locating or filing issues for all of these myself.

FWIW, I am glad 2.0.2 was as big as it was, as it gave us an opportuntiy to address several months worth of pain points discovered in 2.0 / 2.0.1 that I think were inevitable despite the prolonged beta period. But I would definitely rather see more development effort toward 2.1, and would say if there is a 2.0.3, limiting it to "big and easy to fix" bugs is absolutely the right call.

Musescore looks great. I've tried using other score writing software and gotten rid of it within a day. One suggestion though for the next big release. I would love to see an integrated video viewer so that I could compose to a film.

In reply to by peter.frumon

Yeah... Muse(Cu)Base sounds good :D Each of developers will be working on an one thing of Roadmap list, and MuseScore 2.1 will be ready in a few weeks ;|
Seriously: Looking at the past, the version 2.0 was creating several years, and I don't think so that 2.1 will be very quickly. The list of news is very long... But who knows? Perhaps I am wrong (I want!).

In reply to by peter.frumon

Regarding video: it's actually already possible, see the last few responses in the thread referenced above. Even if this process could use refinement, I think integration with tools that specialize in their field is the way to go, as opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel.

Regarding 2.1: just because 2.0 took years, don't assume 2.1 will as well. There were a number of reasons why 2.0 took as long as it did, mostly coming down to the fact that some of what was being done required *major* restructuring / rewriting of the code base. There are no plans for anything so grandiose for 2.1. Keep in mind, the "roadmap" linked above is the list of features being *considered* for 2.1, not what is being *planned*. Maybe only 10% (?) of that list will be implemented for 2.1. The rest may come gradually over time. No one wants a repeat of the 2.0 release cycle where so much was taken on and nothing could be released until it was all completed and ready. That's the whole point of this planning.

Not that I'm against the idea of movie playback or anything. In fact I'm sure it would be very useful. But just to play devils advocate. What is wrong with running VLC in the background? It will be a better video player then musescore will ever be because that is the project's primary purpose. Perhaps integration with vlc would be an easier approach? or something to sync playback.

The video shows that its possible to sync Xjadeo with Musescore which is great. The problem is that on my laptop Xjadeo and Musescore don't play nicely together. Xjadeo mutes Musescore's playback and disables the playback buttons. I'm running Ubuntu Studio latest LTS and Musescore 2.0.2 which I'm running through Wine because I can't figure out how to install Musescore natively.
Any suggestions regarding what is going on?

In reply to by peter.frumon

Probably better to start a new thread in the Support forum for that particular topic, as it is likely to get rather involved & technical and kind of derail any more general discussion of the post-2.0 roadmap. Probably has something to do with your JACK configuration I'd guess, or maybe it's a limitation of Wine.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

The only item on my personal wish list for future functionality remains the ability for beams to span system breaks. It would be less frustrating if there were some practical workaround or even a kludge solution, but I don't know of any.

Still, I know that this is a known issue - so I remain hopeful that a solution will be implemented sooner rather than later. It surprised me, actually, that it wasn't acknowledged in this statement of known limitations of 2.0:

https://musescore.org/en/handbook/known-limitations-musescore-2.0

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