GSoC 2021 Success!

This week marked the end of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program for 2021, which saw over 1200 students work on over 200 open source projects. This year, 3 students joined us at MuseScore, and we are happy to report that all three completed their projects successfully! The projects were as follows:

Chord Symbol Style Editor

MysticSlice, mentored by Marc Sabatella with design support from bradleykunda on the internal team, implemented a way to customise the appearance of chord symbols. He added useful options to the Inspector, like a choice between Standard or Jazz style, as well as detailed customization options in the Format > Style dialog. You can find out more on MysticSlices' blog or by watching his demo videos from week 4.

Smart Tempos

85sid, mentored by njvdberg with design support from the internal team, implemented a popup tempo chooser that appear when you edit a tempo in the score. This makes it easy to switch from a quarter note tempo to a dotted eighth note tempo or even a metric modulation, without having to delete the tempo marking and add a new one from the tempo palettes. He also made changes to how tempos are stored internally that should pave the way to more complicated forms of tempo marking in the future, and made early steps towards rubato playback. You can read more about the Smart Tempos project on 85sid's blog.

Accessible Colour Themes

arjuntaneja79, mentored by Tantacrul and shoogle, implemented two high contrast themes that will help users who experience reduced colour perception or visual acuity. He made changes in the Preferences to make it easy to enable these themes and associated options, and he added rectangular borders to all UI elements to make them stand out when the high contrast themes are enabled. He also made progress towards inverting colours in the score itself to give users the option to view white notes on a black background instead of the usual black on white. You can find out more on arjuntaneja79's blog or by watching his demo video from week 6.

Special mention

Our special thanks go to community member cbjeukendrup who helped out on all three projects this year in an advisory role, providing valuable assistance to students (and mentors!) in understanding the new source code architecture and the Qt Quick / QML declarative framework that has replaced the Qt Widgets / C++ imperative system in most of the UI for MuseScore 4.

Next steps

We will continue to work with the students over the coming weeks to make the final touches necessary to get their code merged into the program, at which point it will become available in the nightly builds for MuseScore 4.