Microsoft Store

• May 17, 2021 - 16:23

I just noticed that Microsoft Store has added musescore. I am curious if this version is identical to the version on the musescore.org website.

Comments

• May 17, 2021 - 17:04

MuseScore has been on the Microsoft Store for quite a long time, but unless something has changed very recently, it's an older version. Not recommend if you can avoid it, much better to install from this site.

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• Sep 3, 2021 - 15:21

RIght now it doens't seem particularly likely that such an update will happen before MuseScore 4, but you never know. But on the flip side, that also means there won't likely be any other additional updates between now and then. So just do the update now and you probably won't have any other updates messages pop up for a while. It will take much less time out of your work day to just do that than once now to try to figure out a way to get someone to update the Microsoft store. Of course, the latter would be doing a service to others as well, but personally I'd rather see effort going into an actual new update, a 3.6.3 to fix the most serious known issues in current versions. And then put that in the Microsoft store as long as we're doing a new release anyhow.

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• Sep 3, 2021 - 15:58

Respectfully, "not this version but the next one will be there" has been the developer response at least since January of last year, see https://musescore.org/en/node/300255#comment-974594
And that promise was not kept with 3.4, 3.5 nor 3.6.
Since the release checklist (https://musescore.org/en/handbook/developers-handbook/references/releas…) does include the Store release, we could even say that versions starting with 3.4 were not released at all by definition.

(Hair-splitting and pedantry aside, I'm perfectly happy with 3.3 as it does everything I really need. The annoying part comes when someone sends me a score written with a newer version and then it might just mostly be able to open it. And yes I could use the installer and get on with my day, but I like the convenience of completely automatic background updates for as many software as possible, instead of each having custom updaters.)

But the fact that this was promised repeatedly and then not delivered points to some kind of fault or resource shortage in the organization or processes. And since this is an open source project, here I am offering to help.

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• Sep 3, 2021 - 16:10

This is indeed very higly annoying.
The problem is that it needs someone from the in-house team to build the Microsoft Store version and also to submit it to Microsoft. As far as I can tell none of this is possible for anybody not on the in-house team, else it would have happened long ago.
On top the last person of the in-house team who knew how this works has left the team about 2 years ago

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• Sep 3, 2021 - 16:36

Actually, I don't think you'll find any posts where anyone has said definitely that it would be, just that we guess it might happen at the next release. None of us volunteers here on the forum have any control over the actual release process. We might contribute code and thus are indeed developers, but the whole management and release is out of our hands. All we can do here is volunteer our time to give the best advice we can based on what we know to be true today and believe to be true in the future.

Indeed, the reasons why it hasn't happened are resource-related - all the people connected to release management are working full-time on MuseScore 4 and the decision was made some time ago not to have additional 3.x releases unless there is an emergency, which seems extremely unlikely at this point. Plus as Jojo mentions, probably the only person who knows how to do this is no longer on the project. Volunteers are always welcome to help with development, but the release process is not something we have control over.

So, your offers to help are certainly welcome, but realistically, there doesn't seem to be a place for volunteer help assistance in the release process at this time, much as we might want it to be so.

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• Sep 3, 2021 - 16:47

Thanks for the clarification, I was not aware that the in-house dev team is separate from the devs active on the forum.
I believe there is nothing in the GPL that would prevent anyone from building MuseScore themselves and releasing it unofficially under their own account on the Store. Might be useful to fork it and change the name to not infringe on the trademark.

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• Sep 3, 2021 - 17:00

My understanding is that the legal requirements for getting software into the Microsoft Store are actually quite stringent, and indeed, that's one of the main reason it exists: to provide known / approved software only and thus avoid likelihood of people installing malware while surfing random websites and downloading random MSI files. Not the only reason to be sure, but it's definitely quite deliberate that it's not meant to be easy to get into.

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