
MuseScore: Create, play and print beautiful sheet music - based2
https://musescore.org/en
======
sjrd
I've been using MuseScore for several years to arrange vocal and piano scores.
It's really good!

The best thing about it being free is not so much that it is free for me, as
the arranger (I've bought score editing software before). It is the fact that
I can actually send the digital scores to the singers, and tell them they can
use the same software for free to rehearse on their own (e.g., setting the
volume of their voice louder, etc.).

~~~
hammock
A cappella?

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vanous
MuseScore is great. Watch this recent episode of FLOSS weekly for interview
with the developers:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyrRvF1iO4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyrRvF1iO4I)

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archagon
One of the nice (tangential) things about MuseScore is that they provide and
curate a really good MIT-licensed GM soundfont called Fluid[1]. (A soundfont
is a collection of samples that usually gets mapped to MIDI instruments. Most
built-in soundfonts are on the order of a few megabytes; this one comes in at
a whopping 140MB!) The latest version is offered as an SF3 file, a modified
version of the SF2 format where samples can be stored as OGG instead of WAV.
The tool used to convert SF2 to SF3 can be found on Github[2] and is
maintained by one of the lead MuseScore developers.

(I used the SF2 version of this soundfont in my new iPad music app[3], <shill>
a kind of doodle-y, multi-instrument sequencer where you draw your notes
directly on a pannable and zoomable canvas rather than plotting them out one-
by-one like in most DAWs. You can draw notes at any point in time and bend
them to any pitch, allowing you to easily play around with guitar solos and
complex rhythms. It's sort of my modern take on sheet music. But I digress...
</shill> Since the Fluid SF2 is so big compared to the SF3, I'm going to try
to modify sftools to re-convert SF3 back to SF2 in order to keep my bundle
size down.)

[1]:
[https://musescore.org/en/handbook/soundfonts](https://musescore.org/en/handbook/soundfonts)

[2]:
[https://github.com/wschweer/sftools](https://github.com/wschweer/sftools)

[3]: [http://composerssketchpad.com](http://composerssketchpad.com)

~~~
adrianh
And to piggyback on your shill with my own shill... I'm also using the Fluid
soundfont in Soundslice. :-)

Example: [https://www.soundslice.com/scores/auld-lang-
syne/](https://www.soundslice.com/scores/auld-lang-syne/)

You can test it out by switching the play mode to "Synthetic" (click "Full
mix" at bottom). Change instruments by clicking "Guitar" along the left
margin.

~~~
archagon
Slick! Love the design. How did you compress it to run on the web?

~~~
adrianh
I converted it to MP3 and did lots of hacks. :-)

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ubikkibu
I used LilyPond for quite a while, but I've found MuseScore just as powerful
and much easier to use. Data entry is very simple once you get into the 4-C
5-D-# rhythm. I haven't contributed to the project--haven't found any bugs I
needed to fix yet--but I am immensely reassured by the availability of the
source code.

~~~
BMarkmann
The output in their screenshots look nice, but it looks like there are some
cases that aren't handled as cleanly as I suspect LilyPond would render them.
In the "Praeludium 10" screenshot on their website, look at the first
sixteenth note in bar 21, for example. It's rendered really close to the left
margin (and obscures the tempo marking); most printed scores would include a
tad more padding for readability. Would be interesting to read their layout
algorithm and compare it to Lily's (I guess I can!).

~~~
Cardshark
Wow, that's weird. I downloaded the score in question
([https://musescore.com/opengoldberg/scores/719586](https://musescore.com/opengoldberg/scores/719586))
and opened it in MuseScore, and found that for some reason that's the way the
score's style controls were set. The "Barline to note distance" (under the
Style menu in MuseScore, choose "General…", and then click "Measure" on the
left) is by default 1.2 times the space between two lines of the staff. But in
this score, it's 0.6! I have no idea why—changing that parameter back to the
default seems to yield a much better layout.

There's also something else going on with that screenshot, though. The person
who took it put page breaks in different places than in the actual score,
which is why that tempo marking is overlapping. If you open that same score in
MuseScore, the tempo marking is positioned appropriately.

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Klasiaster
Also Denemo might be worth a look:
[http://www.denemo.org/](http://www.denemo.org/)

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clentaminator
If you're interested in score layout, Steinberg are working on a new score
layout application with (from what I gather) a lot of emphasis on layout
flexibility, and there are a series of blog posts about some of the more
interesting and subtle score layout issues, including how the other major
notation applications handle edge cases.

The most recent post was [http://blog.steinberg.net/2015/12/development-diary-
part-12/](http://blog.steinberg.net/2015/12/development-diary-part-12/)

No disclaimers; I'm not affiliated with the product. Just a keen reader of the
development diary.

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laurent123456
I don't know if it's just my browser (Windows Firefox) but the playback of
songs seem a bit off. For example this one:
[https://musescore.com/user/3967646/scores/1673111](https://musescore.com/user/3967646/scores/1673111)
the red overlay is late by a few hundred milliseconds. Not much but it's quite
noticeable.

~~~
deadhead
It happens to me as well (Windows, Chrome) but inconsistently (sometimes, its
on time). Looking at the JS, it might be since it schedules to check for
updates every 100ms (`timerId = setInterval(update, 100);`) instead of
scheduling a callback for the time of the next bar.

Edit: Also, the JS `setInterval` callback can be delayed.

Edit: After debugging their code some more, the above isn't why (though is
still inefficient). The audio player (SoundManager) they are using only
updates the audio playback time at a rough granularity. If I log the time
values, I get the following (all in milliseconds):

    
    
        0
        182.404
        681.59
        1180.778
        1680.963
        2179.152
        ...
    

The song is 120 BPM which means that the first bar changes is at 2000ms
causing the first bar change to be 179ms late.

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Roodgorf
Anybody know if/how well this can export scores to MIDI? I've recently been
learning to use Ableton and found that exporting my compositions created in
Finale to work excellently, which has given me a whole new level of control
over it.

~~~
thomasbonte
The MIDI export in MuseScore is very solid. All import/export formats are
listed at [https://musescore.org/en/handbook/file-
formats](https://musescore.org/en/handbook/file-formats)

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shmerl
Going through several such editors (including Musescore), I ended up using
Rosegarden.

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em3rgent0rdr
I love MuseScore.

