MuseScore in 2016: The year in review

2016 was a wonderfully busy year for MuseScore. As we head into 2017 looking forward to new accomplishments and milestones, let’s take a moment to look back over the year gone by.

2.0.3 update

We spent the first part of the year preparing MuseScore version 2.0.3, the last update to MuseScore 2.0, which we released at the beginning of April 2016 with more than 200 changes. Read all about it at MuseScore 2.0.3 is released!

(There was later an emergency 2.0.3.1 update for only the Mac version to make MuseScore compatible with macOS Sierra.)

Google Summer of Code

No sooner was the 2.0.3 release out of the way than the Google Summer of Code began, with MuseScore developers teaming up with four student programmers from around the world to add new features to MuseScore. Their work, which wrapped up at the end of August, went directly into forming the basis the next major version of MuseScore. Read all about the results at Wrapping up Google Summer of Code 2016!

Developing MuseScore 3

Along with the Google Summer of Code work, MuseScore creator Werner Schweer began an ambitious overhaul of MuseScore’s source code to make the software smarter, faster, and easier to use. Everything came together when we officially launched the development of MuseScore 3.0 in May 2016. Learn more about how we’re making MuseScore Smarter, Faster, and Easier!

2016 by the numbers

Code contributors

The MuseScore 3.0 development effort attracted new contributors to the codebase. On December 21st, Vinayak Vivek became the 90th person to contribute code to MuseScore in the past four years (nearly half of those 90 people contributed in 2016). Vinayak’s fix for the alignment of a triangular notehead will be in the next version of MuseScore (see below).

MuseScore.org activity

In 2015, when versions 2.0, 2.0.1, and 2.0.2 were all released, there was a dramatic jump in activity on the MuseScore.org forums, approximately doubling from previous years. Although 2016 was a relatively quiet year by comparison, and some activity shifted to the MuseScore Discussion and Support group on Facebook, the numbers held steady at their newly high levels.

In 2016, there were:

• A little over 6,500 forum posts
• A little over 1,700 issues logged in the tracker
• And about 42,500 comments
• … Posted by about 3,300 unique users
• About 1,250 edits to the MuseScore Handbook
• … By 88 unique users
• 22 new plugins in the plugin repository
• ... Created by 17 people

Translation

Our international team of volunteer translators has translated MuseScore 2.0.3’s interface into 35 languages, with dozens more partially complete. The Arabic (Sudan, Egypt), Chinese (Traditional), Esperanto, Portuguese, Serbian, Korean, Finnish, and Hebrew teams in particular all worked diligently this year to complete their translations, so you can now use MuseScore in any of those languages and thank them for their work.

You can help translate MuseScore, too, as well as the online Handbook! See Translation instructions.

Downloads

Since the release of version 2.0.3 at the beginning of April 2016, in the past nine months, MuseScore has been downloaded approximately 1.9 million times. This works out to about 211,000 monthly downloads, or over seven thousand downloads per day.

Looking ahead

As stated above, 2.0.3 was the last update to version 2.0, and the focus is now on 3.0 development. We invite you to test the latest features in the nightly builds, and report the problems you encounter. Your feedback is very welcome in the Technology Preview forum, and precise bug reports can be directly posted in the Issue tracker. If you’re a programmer as well as a musician, we would appreciate your help fixing those bugs—as MuseScore is free and open source, anyone can get the source and share code contributions on GitHub. Don't forget that you can also support the future of MuseScore with a donation.

But 3.0 is still a long way from ready to release. In the short term? Get ready for MuseScore 2.1—planned for release in the first quarter of 2017.

This will be a sizable step forward from the 2.0 series. Expect a new “Swap” function, support for SFZ sample libraries, and so much more. Prerelease nightly builds for 2.1 are now available for download from the same page as the 3.0 nightlies, and unlike the 3.0 builds, the 2.1 builds are already quite stable. We welcome your feedback and reports of problems you encounter in the Technology Preview forum so we can make the 2.1 release in the next few months the best it can possibly be.

That’s all for 2016. Happy New Year, everybody!