News

Hello everyone,
My name's Mark Johnson and I work for OSS Watch, an open source advisory service for UK education based at the University of Oxford.

We're currently compiling a list of Open Source Options for Education - open source options for educational establishments where proprietary software might otherwise be considered.

MuseScore is on our list, but as part of the list we'd like to include examples of real-world usage where possible.

If you're currently using MuseScore in an

...well, almost!

First of all, a nightly version 74b4a45 (2012-09-01) or later is required. Currently, such a nightly is only available for Mac but it should be available for Linux soon and for Windows as soon as Win nightlies will be resumed. A self-compiled version from Github can also be used, of course!

Changes:

1) During note entry in TAB staves, the entry cursor (the 'blue rectangle' cursor) does not span the whole staff vertically as for other staves,

Before explaining the new plugin framework, let's define what problems we faced with the plugin subsystem in MuseScore 1.2.

One problem is the binding to the qt library. The code to enable this is very huge and consists of > 1100 files with > 297000 lines of code. This is not maintainable for the MuseScore team. It seems that qt does not maintain this anymore and it will not be available for the next major Qt version.

Another problem is

Good news! We've set the release date of the digital OpenGoldberg score on May 28th. For those who are not familiar with the OpenGoldberg project, you can learn all about it at http://kck.st/opengoldberg This project has been a great way for us to push the development of MuseScore.

On the one side there was the making of the Goldberg Variations score for which Werner used the development snapshot of the upcoming MuseScore 2.0. Since typesetting this score was very challenging,

With 3,000,000 people having downloaded MuseScore, I imagine there must be quite a few of us doing interesting things with it. From newcomers to music software writing their first compositions, to hobbyists looking for a better, easier, and/or cheaper way to notate their music, to professional musicians, educators, and composers creating works for performance and even publication - I expect MuseScore is being used for all these things and more.

So how about it? Let's hear your stories!

A week ago, I was at FOSDEM with Thomas and Werner to promote MuseScore to fellow developers, to new users, and to husbands, fathers of new users. Here are some photos.

It was a great opportunity to discuss the future of MuseScore and the remaining work to release MuseScore 2.0. I sat down with Werner and we came out with a MuseScore 2.0 roadmap. The list is probably incomplete, and will move but at least we now have

Our last news update is already from a couple of months ago with the maintenance release of MuseScore 1.1. It has been a successful release with more than half a million downloads and counting. Something we are very proud of. Since then some of our attention has shifted to the next major release, MuseScore 2.0, to make it the best release ever. To join this effort, check out the MuseScore nightly builds and report bugs in the issue tracker

For anyone interested, I've just finished creating MuseScore versions of 50+ of my jazz compositions. It's something I've been working on in the background for the last few months ever since 1.1 came out, but I decided to really accelerate the process the couple of weeks. I've been uploading them to musescore.com as I go, so here is a link to the full set:

http://musescore.com/marcsabatella/sets/leadsheets

I also wrote up a blog article on the experience.

I thought these might prove

MuseScore users might be interested in my new ebook – MuseScore: The Essential Beginner's Guide. It's available at a special launch price for 4 days.

The book contains step-by-step tutorials showing you how to publish, play and share your music. For more information, visit http://www.musescoretips.com/musescore-the-essential-beginners-guide/

25% of each sale will be donated back to the MuseScore project.

All the best
Katie

With the release of MuseScore 1.1, there are a number of enhancements and new features that will be of interest to jazz musicians and others creating lead sheets. I have updated my tutorial on creating lead sheets to take advantage of these improvements. It is split into two parts: The Basics and Advanced Topics .

Below, I describe in some detail the changes to be found in MuseScore 1.1. But first, to whet your appetite, here is the chart