MuseScore Studio is a graphical music notation application for composing, arranging and publishing sheet music. It provides a visual score editor in which musicians enter notes and other notation directly onto staves, with the layout updated automatically.
The software supports a broad range of musical styles, from simple melodies and piano pieces to complex orchestral arrangements. Its engraving system handles many aspects of spacing, alignment and page layout, reducing the amount of manual formatting required to prepare readable scores.
MuseScore Studio also includes score playback and audio mixing facilities. Musicians can listen to their compositions using built-in instrument sounds or compatible external sound libraries while refining the notation.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Graphical score editing – enter and edit notes directly on a musical staff using keyboard, mouse or MIDI input.
- Automatic engraving – adjusts note spacing, system breaks and musical symbol placement.
- Multistaff notation – supports piano, orchestral, choral, percussion and other instrumental scores.
- Advanced notation – handles articulations, dynamics, tuplets, slurs, ties, ornaments and other musical symbols.
- Guitar tablature – provides tablature notation alongside conventional staff notation.
- Percussion notation – supports drum sets and other unpitched instruments.
- Instrument parts – creates and manages individual instrumental parts from larger scores.
- Integrated playback – reproduces compositions using internal sounds and supported sound libraries.
- Audio mixer – controls instrument sounds, effects, volume and panning.
- MuseSounds support – provides playback using compatible sampled instrument libraries.
- MusicXML interchange – imports and exports scores for use with other notation applications.
- MIDI interchange – imports and exports Standard MIDI Files.
- MEI interchange – supports Music Encoding Initiative files.
- Score printing – prepares publication-quality pages and exports PDF documents.
- Additional exports – produces images and audio files from completed scores.
- Cross-platform support – runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Website: musescore.org
Support:
Developer: MuseScore Studio development team
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
MuseScore is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Open Source Scorewriters | |
|---|---|
| Rosegarden | Sophisticated MIDI (and audio) sequencer and notation editor |
| MuseScore Studio | Graphical WYSIWYG music score typesetter |
| Lilypond | Produce musical scores that are engraved with traditional layout rules |
| Frescobaldi | LilyPond sheet music text editor |
| Denemo | Musical score editor intended primarily as a frontend to Lilypond |
| music21 | Toolkit for computational musicology |
| mup | Very feature-laden application for producing printed music |
| TuxGuitar | Multitrack tablature editor and player writen in Java-SWT |
| Aria Maestosa | Midi sequencer/editor |
| Gregorio | Tools for Typesetting Gregorian Chant |
| Canorus | Graphical music score editor written for the Qt4 toolkit |
| PMW | Music typesetting program for creating high-quality scores |
| EasyABC | Graphical editor for creating and editing ABC music notation |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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