MuseScore 3.1 Release Candidate

Today we are pleased to announce the Release Candidate of a significant update, MuseScore 3.1.
This release includes the changes announced in the MuseScore 3.1 Beta release, and it also introduces a few significant improvements related to automatic layout, performance, and fretboard diagrams.

This is a pre-release version of MuseScore 3.1. The final version will be available by the end of the month.

Download MuseScore 3.1 Release Candidate

• Windows 64-bit
• Windows 32-bit
• macOS 10.12 or higher
• Linux AppImage (64-bit only)

MuseScore 3.1 Release Candidate can be installed along with the stable release.
Both versions will share the same data directory Documents/MuseScore3. Files created in MuseScore 3.1 are fully compatible with MuseScore 3.0.5.

New and Improved Features

A complete list of the changes available in MuseScore 3.1 Beta can be found in the Beta version announcement. Here is a list of new and improved features:

Flexible Automatic Placement

Automatic placement (autoplace) was one of the most significant advances in MuseScore 3 over MuseScore 2. It provides much better default positioning for elements, avoiding most collisions and thus reducing the need for manual adjustment. However, in the cases where manual adjustment is necessary, users sometimes felt autoplace got in the way. We have listened to these concerns and come up with some major improvements in the flexibility of automatic placement.

As of MuseScore 3.1, automatic placement will no longer prevent you from moving elements wherever you like - including moving them closer to the staff, overlapping other elements, or even onto the staff. By default, autoplace will stay enabled for elements you move, meaning it will continue to update the position of moved elements to avoid further collisions as you edit your score, and other elements will continue to avoid the moved element. This provides the best of both worlds - great default positioning and automatic collision avoidance as you edit, but also complete freedom to move elements around.

Besides, MuseScore 3.1 will detect when you have moved an element to the opposite side of the staff and will automatically convert between Above and Below placement, just as if you had used the “X” command or Inspector to flip it.

In the cases where you don’t want any collision avoidance performance for an element, you can also disable autoplace for it using a new keyboard shortcut “=” (customizable like most commands, via Edit > Preferences > Shortcuts). The Inspector remains available for this purpose, and you can now also enable or disable autoplace for selections of multiple elements or ranges. There is even a command to turn off automatic placement entirely and return all elements to the default positions they would have according to their style settings (plus any manual adjustments you have manually applied).

Fretboard Diagram Improvements

Fretboard diagrams are vastly improved, featuring:

• Multiple dots per string
• Partial and multiple barres
• Different dot shapes (especially useful for Ted Greene diagrams)
• Ability to not show nut
• Customizable distance between strings and frets
• Chord symbols for diagrams
• Improved ability to save chord symbols to the palette
• Improved fretboard editing interface
• Many bugfixes

Continuous View Performance

MuseScore 3 introduced significant performance improvements for page view by only laying out the portion of a score affected by any given edit operation rather than always laying out the entire score as in previous versions. This makes it easier to work on large scores. However, continuous view did not benefit from this improvement and got slower compared to MuseScore 2. Now MuseScore 3.1 brings these same improvements to continuous view, thus making it a more viable option as well regardless of the size of your score.

Inspector Facelift

The Inspector has been made more compact and visually streamlined.

Important notes

• We decided to revert an experimental feature "Soloing playback when a measure is selected" introduced in MuseScore 3.1 Beta. Despite the generally positive feedback, we understand that it breaks the workflow for a lot of users who select a measure to start playback of the whole score. We will revise the implementation and come back with better solution.
• Bends are still out of tune. Unfortunately we could not find safe solution for the issue. We will keep working on it and implement the fix in a later version.
• Yes, we forgot to update the splash screen, so it still declares that this is "v3.1 BETA" :)
• The list of known regressions: #289565: [Epic] 3.1-RC Regressions that must be fixed