Thank you for your donations
MuseScore.org started as a very basic community website a little more than one year ago. Today it's the home of the rapidly growing MuseScore user and developer community, attracting around 2000 unique visitors per day and serving around 300.000 pageviews on monthly basis. Needless to say this is quite a success, even more when considering this is all accomplished by volunteer work. This success comes however with a price tag, because musescore.org quickly outgrew its simple hosting facility. Thankfully, we have received many donations which make it possible to keep musescore.org up and running on better hardware. So thank you all for your donations!
The year 2009 is not over yet, but let's do some more number crunching. First of all, the MuseScore software has been downloaded over 200.000 times this year. Especially the past 5 months, we have seen a tremendous growth which could be related to the fact that MuseScore is available for Mac OS since the past summer. The forum has received over 8000 posts & comments and is growing every day with your MuseScore questions and solutions. The issue tracker, mostly used by the developers, has received 625 issues since March and 65% has been fixed.
Musescore.org is now translated in 24 languages, some very well up to date, others still need some translating work. Knowing that 15 months ago musescore.org was only available in German and English, this is yet again an indication that the MuseScore project is growing very rapidly. For 2010, we want to go even more international by making it more easy to translate using a translation server which is currently being developed and tested.
MuseScore.org was running on standard shared hosting up until the past summer, but with the growing traffic and content, a better hosting facility became necessary. And so after searching the best solution to host a Drupal based website, we decided to settle on Amazon EC2 using a prepackaged & optimized Drupal distribution. We selected based on ease of maintenance & scalability, a good backup strategy and all this with a decent pricing. The total budget for one year on a small instance is $600 plus the variable costs of bandwidth and storage. We estimated that the total cost of the first year would be around $750 and this is also the figure you will see on the donation meter.
With the new year around the corner, it will be exciting to see how the MuseScore project will further mature and head towards a 1.0 release. I am very happy that I'm part of this project and community, and I'm sure 2010 will be as exciting as 2009. Cheers.
Comments
In some countries, we are able to claim payment for software from our taxation, but not donations unless they are charities.
I know that this might be a bit too much effort for not much result, but if there was something in Paypal where it could say "Payment for MuseScore software" rather than "Donation", it may encourage some of us to, in essence, donate a little bit more.
For years I've stuggled with Denemo, NoteEdit and Rosegarden for creating leadsheets for a jazz quartet. MuseScore has made my life much easier. Thank you!
Brian Wood
San Francisco, CA
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Thinkpad X61
saxophone
I looked at the statisctics, so I hope, that the real state of czech translation will be changed in time, when almost all is translated. Probably it is changed manually?
When I translated, the biggest problem was (I am little exagerating :-) with the translation of names for languages, in which was MuseScore already translated, because of some mismatch - the characters of original part weren't displayed correctly in strings. I was confused and gave up this effort at least to guess the reality.
In reply to Status of czech translation by pfri
The translations in the translation server are not up to date. The translations have been manually submitted in order to test the translation flow and once everything works well, the translations will be synchronized with the code repository.
The most recent Czech translation can be found in the repository. Open the ts file in QT Linguist and that will tell you how up to date the translation is.
"because of some mismatch": can you elaborate this? Was it the source string which was not displayed well?
In reply to Translation server not in sync with latest translations by Thomas
I mean this source text found in strings group "language":
اÙعربÙØ©
ελληνικά
Ð ÑÑÑкий
ภาษาà¹à¸à¸¢
ç¹é«ä¸æ (å°ç£)
or more understandable:
Español
CatalÃ
Français
Português
Português brasileiro
RomânÄ
Türkçe
In reply to Exemples by pfri
I think language names don't need to be translated. As on this website, an user may prefer reading your language name in your own language.
I will take a look to remove the language name from the TS file.
For the last few years I struggled with Finale and absolutely detest it. I was happy to find MuseScore and love using it. It's not without it's quirks right now, but no more than Finale - a grossly overpriced product (not to mention the yearly upgrades for nominal new features).
Just donated $10 with the hope that this project will continue and improve. Thanks to the developers for all you do!
Translation of languages brings higher comfort for users, say even for small children students, which would like to wish to switch between them to see the terminology differences and select the languages from translated menu.
The names for languages have their transcriptions in English, if there is problem with encoding of source text with original characters (for example accents). More exotic languages have special characters and own alphabets, but english transcriptions they have too. The problem appears only in way, the source text is entered. The solution would be to rewrite: French for Francais etc.