MuseScore: open source notation software

By Trevor
Posted Sunday September 21st 2008 14:16.

I’ve got an old Sibelius CD down in the warehouse, but I couldn’t be ar*ed to find and fetch, and it probably wouldn’t work on Vista anyway. So … I had a look around and installed MuseScore, a free, open source competitor for Finale Notepad (which incidentally now costs $10). David Bolton does a head-to-head here. It’s fine for my basic, barrel organ needs, and I found my way round the interface quickly. The big no, however, is that as far as I can see it doesn’t support MIDI keyboard input on Windows, meaning that writing with it would be way too slow. Other stuff: no undo, problems selecting notes/bars/…, cut/copy don’t appear to work, can’t find way of changing instrument output… One to watch – forums here.

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  1. musicman
    October 2nd 2008 13:38

    Have you tried Fomus? I heard it was interesting a couple of years ago.

  2. Trevor
    October 2nd 2008 16:12

    Doesn’t look like anything happened this year. I had a look at MuseScore 0.9.4, but MIDI input still doesn’t seem to work and quite a lot of other stuff seems freaky so with great regret I’ve got Notepad.

  3. David Bolton
    October 13th 2008 18:38

    MIDI keyboard support for Windows is in the works for the next release of MuseScore as are improvements to copy-paste. MuseScore supports unlimited undo.

  4. Trevor
    October 24th 2008 11:57

    The undo feature doesn’t work on Windows for me. Looking forward to the MIDI support – that seems like crucial.

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