Saving in Mp3 format

Anonymous
• Sep 21, 2009 - 19:18

I have an mp3 player and to listen to my compositions I have to use the computer as my mp3 player does not accept midi format or any other offered by muse score. I can change midi to mp3 using the internet but the resources are limited meaning I can only convert small files or one file per day. If you could save music on muse score directly into mp3 format it would be much easier. If there is a better free service on-line or available for download I would like to know also.


Comments

MuseScore cannot use mp3 because this is an unfree format, protected by patents. The equivalent free format is Ogg Vorbis which claims to be patent free. My "mp3" player can also play Ogg files. An alternative is to save in "wav" format and use one of the numerous utilities to compress wav to mp3.

Save it as a .wav file. If you have itunes, you can import the .wav file and convert to MP3. I'm sure other media players/free file converters can do this as well.

I've done this for all my songs and it works fine.

In reply to by Michael M

Easier way to do this (on Windows) is to enable the file extensions (look it up in a video, i forgot how to do this) and then right click on the saved WAV file and press "Rename." Then simply change the extension from ".wav" to ".mp3", and this will convert the file. No need for iTunes.

I like the suggestion about using Lame in the way that Audacity (another open source project) does, and I hope that's a possibility.

Until then, I use a free program called Format Factory to convert my files to mp3. It's free, quick, and does batch processing of multiple files. I actually get better results saving my MuseScore audio as a midi first, then converting the midi to mp3, as opposed saving as a wav file first. For some reason when I save to wav files from MuseScore, the audio has some sort of echo that makes the wav (and the resulting mp3 after it's converted) sound "muddy." When I save as a midi file and then convert that to an mp3, the sound is much more crisp and clear, although it does sound like a computer file, whereas the wav file is supposed to sound more like the instruments playing it.

In reply to by newsome

I think Lame doesn't produce very well mp3 files. I haven't checked it thoroughly, but I think I get better sound when I use Logic on my Mac. Or even if I use the Windows tool for recording, which can read a wav file and save it as an mp3 file.

Another thing people don't think of very much is that wav files are big, but our mp3 players nowadays are huge! If you have 8 GB memory in your mp3 player, it can fit ten music CD's. That's some 70 hours of music. In wav format! How many hours of your own music written with MuseScore do you have? The only downside seems to be the loading time when you transfer the music from your computer to your mp3 player.

I still have my Sony Walkman CD player, but I never use it. It's like a huge mp3 player with only 64 MB memory. When the sizes grew to some 512 MB, people were able to keep almost one whole music CD in them, as uncompressed, original quality sound, but they of course prefered to have mp3 format instead, allowing more music to fit in. Well, do we really need to have all our music as mp3 files in our players?

In reply to by jotti

Flac is the better alternative regarding quality / size. It's a non destructive format and so the quality is the same than WAV but the filesize is very small. You can save as FLAC from MuseScore and FLAC is a free format. Unfortunalty there is not a lot of multimedia players able to read FLAC..., especially the apple ones can't... See a list here : http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html

That's being said, MP3 is popular and lame is a very good implementation. I might take a look to integrate lame like audacity did for next major MuseScore version.

Hello
When trying to get one of my pieces onto my tablet, I found all you have to do is-
1. Go onto the piece you wish to copy.
2. Go to save as
3 .In the 'save as type' section change the format to 'Wave Audio'
4. Save the file in a folder
5. Just drag and drop the file into your device

Hope this helps

Just about all android phones and many media player and just about all software players support ogg and vorbis which is better than mp3. So i don't think you ll be missing too much on playbk support

There are free programs to convert WAV to MP3. Export from Musescore n WAV and use those programs to convert to MP3.. "AUDACITY" is a free program for just that purpose.. Try it.. works very well.

Having read the comments, I must be missing something but just in case....

You can export a MuseScore file as mp3 already, there's no need to save as WAV and then convet.

V 2.0.3
Select File/Export and then mp3

In reply to by Ewart North

This is an old thread, and things have changed since it was created. It is now possible to download an MP3 from MuseScore.com, so anyone needing one who doesn't have the appropriate LAME files in his computer can simply upload to the MuseScore server and then download an MP3 from there.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Ah yes!
... and some think copyright law is complicated.

Patents.png

Jojo's link shows patent #5,924,060 expiring in August, 2017 and patent # 5,703,999 expiring in December 2017:
https://madfileformatscience.garymcgath.com/2016/04/05/mp3patent/

On the other hand...
Roger's link shows those same 2 patents as having already expired - in 2007 and 2014, respectively:
http://www.osnews.com/story/24954/US_Patent_Expiration_for_MP3_MPEG-2_H…

However, both articles list patent #6,009,399 as expiring on April 16, 2017.

Apparently, the first filing date vs the patent's grant date, along with a 17 or 20 year term, adds to the confusion.
From Jojo's link:
Fraunhofer, which holds the MP3 patents, isn’t saying when they expire; uncertainty works to its advantage.

Go figure... :-)

Once, I composed a song called 'The Shark Song." I don't know how it happened, but I am pretty sure my mom DID SAVE IT AS A MP3 FILE.

If you want to listen to your scores as MP3 the option already exists. Go to "File" hit "Export" then under the File Name there should be a selection box called "Save as Type" with the default option being PDF. If you click on that box a list will appear with MP3 being an option. Select MP3, give your file a name, hit save, and after a couple of a seconds of exporting you'll have your MP3 file ready to go.
What I like best about this is if you are using soundfonts, MuseScore will export using those soundfonts, so it'll sound exactly as if you played it using the MuseScore application.

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