Open-source (i.e. free) Music Score Program

[Adam R Sweet]

If you've ever ventured into the world of music notation, you'll know that to produce musical scores there's normally a large amount of expense involved to pick up the relevant application (either Sibelius - my favoured application - or Finale).That's not an ideal situation if you're short of the (hundreds of) dollars required to grab a licence, and whilst the developers of Sibelius and Finale both offer reduced-priced, lesser-featured versions of their applications, wouldn't it be great if the open source community were able to lend a hand much as GIMP has for people unable to afford Photoshop

That's where Musescore fits in. An open-source notation app, it offers all the features you need such as transposition, part extraction and much more - for the super-awesome price of free! Throw in the reading and saving of MusicXML documents which enable you to move scores between any of the major notation apps, and MuseScore - when it eventually finds its way to 1.0 - looks as though it'll be absolutely ideal for anyone looking to notate their next hit song, or write for a symphony orchestra near you.



Get it here: http://musescore.org/en/

[Dave Onastik]

Looks promising. It crashed on me a couple of times, so there are some bugs. Judging by how much work has been put into it so far, I have no doubt they will be worked out. Thanks for the info.

[Pat Jack]

Musescore is a new one on me, most of my experience is with finale, and a pencil although I've used the notation and editing features in Sonar and Cakewalk also. Finale is a favorite but free is much more better, (yeah you right!). I'm looking forward to learning more through feedback and use of Musescore by the membership!

[Steve Sweeney-Turner]

Hi to all! :-)

I'm currently using a mid-range version of Finale for my project (ScotMus.com), but am often having to grapple with its various notorious idiosyncrasies (although I've found a few handy "cheats" recently to do with making non-standard notational templates in MuseScore ported over to Finale via MusicXML, which Finale reads, but also allows a certain amount of editorial tweaking, despite itself!). I guess my main problem with the cheapo Finale I've got (given that I'm using it to make multimedia presentations) is that it doesn't allow me to use alternative MIDI sound-fonts. Given that I'm often transcribing/publishing early material, this is a biggie - for example, having to use Finale's "guitar" (read: "modern Spanish guitar") for pre-1800 material originally written for anything from lutes to the "English" guitar/"Guittar", etc. Equally, Finale doesn't have an awful lot of Renaissance wind instruments available (perhaps worst of all, Finale's "recorder" is just completely nasty even within the modern descant pitch-range, let alone all the others).

I also, as mentioned above, have been experimenting with MuseScore, given that I'm a skint person. So far, I don't like the clunky interface. And, as Dave has already noted, it occasionally crashes in the middle of work. I've tried it on both Windoze and Linux Debian, and it's crashed in both. Oddly, for an open-source project whose native platform is indeed Linux, its crashes on that platform (for me, anyway) have been terminal, requiring me to entirely re-install Debian from scratch no less than twice - the odd thing being that WinXP seems to surive MuseScore crashes! This is probably more of a reflection of my lack of hardcore knowledge about Linux than anything else, though.

However, on the plus side, MuseScore lets you use all sorts of stuff like archaic clefs and note-heads that you'd otherwise have to pay a very ugly penny for. And it also allows you to patch in pretty-much any MIDI sound-font you fancy. But having said that, I find its MIDI interface incredibly clunky, and worse than that, it just doesn't play Finale's sound-font at anything like the level of ineloquence that Finale itself does - MuseScore very often makes things sound appallingly muddy.

Am I missing something, or are other folks finding the same problems with MuseScore?

[Dave Light]

As you know, Adam, I'm one of those die-hard "do -it - by - hand" types when it comes to notation. However, I'm not a ludite! I've squirreled Musescore away in my "Favourites"; one of these rainy days, I'll load it up and give it a test run. I'm curious about just how much program you get these days for free!

[Aitor]

If you do like guitar pro there's is a GNU Linux program called TUXGuitar that can read an write .gp4 and earlier files, is not perfect but solves some problems, still I do prefer the original Guitar Pro.

[Nancy T H]

Someone just gave me a copy of ABC Explorer, which is freeware or shareware (don't know which yet). I haven't used it yet, but it comes well recommended and it saves files in ABC format, which is widely used for sheet music, I understand--which Finale doesn't do--at least it didn't seem to when I tried it. Will report further when I have more information.

[Sam Shazaam]

I liked MuseScore but had some troubles getting it to work on my system. Another good program for sheet music is called Denemo. The program will save in several formats making it easier to share the results with others.

[Robert Harris]

It sounds good, but will support always be there for a freeware application?

[Sue B.]

Really? I've held off buying Finale, from cost & not wanting to put on an aged computer. I knew it very well when I taught in public school, but fear that now I will be starting over anyway. I wouldn't use a program now like I did there, but there's stuff I do want for my students that just takes so much TIME the old way. Thanks!! Sue