Music notation and composition software

MuseScore is an open source and free music notation software. For support, contribution, and bug reports visit MuseScore.org. Fork and make pull requests!

Features

• WYSIWYG design, notes are entered on a "virtual notepaper"
• TrueType font(s) for printing & display allows for high quality scaling to all sizes
• Easy & fast note entry
• Many editing functions
• MusicXML import/export
• MIDI (SMF) import/export
• MuseData import
• MIDI input for note entry
• Integrated sequencer and software synthesizer to play the score
• Print or create pdf files

More info

• MuseScore Homepage
• MuseScore Git workflow instructions.
• How to compile MuseScore?

License

MuseScore is licensed under GPL version 2.0. See LICENSE.GPL in the same directory.

Packages

• aeolus Clone of Aeolus Disabled by default in the stable releases. See http://dev-list.musescore.org/Aeolus-Organ-Synth-td7578364.html Kept as an example of how to integrate with a complex synthesizer.

• assets Graphical assets, use them if you need a MuseScore icon. For logo, color etc... see https://musescore.org/en/about/logos-and-graphics

• awl Audio Widget Library, from the MusE project

• build Utility files for build

• bww2mxml Command line tool to convert BWW files to MusicXML. BWW parser is used by MuseScore to import BWW files.

• demos A few MuseScore files to demonstrate what can be done

• fluid Clone of FluidSynth, ported to C++ and customized

• fonts Contains fontforge source (sfd) + ttf/otf fonts. MuseScore includes the "Emmentaler" font from the Lilypond project.

• libmscore Data model of MuseScore

• mscore Main code for the MuseScore UI

• msynth Abstract interface to Fluid + Aeolus

• mtest Unit testing using QTest

• omr Optical music recognition

• share Files moved to /usr/share/... on install

• test Old tests. Should move to mtest

• vtest Visual tests. Compare reference images with current implementation

• thirdparty Contains projects which are included for convenience, usually to integrate them into the build system to make them available for all supported platforms.

  • thirdparty/rtf2html Used for capella import

  • thirdparty/diff Not used currently. Diff, Match and Patch Library

  • thirdparty/ofqf OSC server interface. Based on OSC for Qt4

  • thirdparty/singleapp Clone from Qt Single Application

  • thirdparty/portmidi Clone from PortMidi

  • thirdparty/beatroot It's a core part of BeatRoot Vamp Plugin by Simon Dixon and Chris Cannam, used in MIDI import for beat detection. (https://code.soundsoftware.ac.uk/projects/beatroot-vamp/repository)

Building

Read the developer handbook for a complete build walkthrough and a list of dependencies.

Getting sources

If using git to download repo of entire code history, type:

git clone https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore.git
cd MuseScore

Otherwise, you can just download the latest source release tarball from https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/releases, and then from your download directory type:

tar xzf MuseScore-x.x.x.tar.gz
cd MuseScore-x.x.x

Release Build

To compile MuseScore, type:

make release

If something goes wrong, then remove the whole build subdirectory with make clean and start new with make release.

Running

To start MuseScore, type:

./build.release/mscore/mscore

The Start Center window will appear on every invocation until you disable that setting via the "Preferences" dialog.

Installing

To install to default prefix using root user, type:

sudo make install

Debug Build

A debug version can be built by doing make debug instead of make release.

To run the debug version, type:

./build.debug/mscore/mscore

Testing

See mtest/README.md or https://musescore.org/en/developers-handbook/testing for instructions on how to run the test suite.