The MuseScore Blog

Warp speed, Mr. Sulu

Isn’t it a composer’s dream to get heard by thousands of people? Composer Arthur Breur accomplished this with a ragtime he created in honour of George Takei’s birthday. George Takei is best known for his portrayal of Mr. Sulu in the Star Trek series. And just like he did on the USS Enterprise, Mr. Sulu pushed the ragtime views counter into warp speed by tweeting about the song to his 600,000+ followers.

Honored to have a “George Takei Rag” written just for me by a fan! Oh myyyymusescore.com/arthurbreur/ge…

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei)

April 21, 2013

Listen to Arthur’s ragtime below or check out the videoscore he created. Well done Arthur!

Ragtime #3: George Takei Rag by arthurbreur

MuseScore 1.3 is released

We released MuseScore 1.3 this week. It’s a bug fix release, but what is new is that we also deliver an MSI package. This will makes it much easier to install MuseScore across multiple computers, ideal for system administrators of school networks. Read more about 1.3 in your own language.

• English: MuseScore 1.3 is released
• Dansk: MuseScore 1.3 er ude!
• Deutsch: MuseScore 1.3 ist freigegeben
• Eesti: MuseScore 1.3 on väljas
• Français: MuseScore 1.3 est disponible !
• Italiano: Rilascio di MuseScore 1.3
• Nederlands: MuseScore 1.3 is beschikbaar
• Magyar: Megjelent a MuseScore 1.3
• Polski: Wydano MuseScore 1.3
• Tiếng Việt: Ra mắt MuseScore phiên bản 1.3
• 日本語: MuseScore 1.3 をリリースしました
• Español: MuseScore 1.3 ha sido liberado
• Norsk: MuseScore 1.3 er tilgjengelig

MuseScore in Best of Kickstarter 2012

A picture of MuseScore lead developer Werner Schweer was featured in the Best of Kickstarter 2012. It’s linked to our successful Open Goldberg Variations Kickstarter project for which Werner used MuseScore to create an open source edition of Bach’s masterpiece.

The new edition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations as well as a superb recording of our partner Kimiko Ishizaka were released to the public in May 2012 under Creative Commons Zero. You can listen and download the work from opengoldbergvariations.org or enjoy it on iPad with the free app for iPad.

For the curious minds who wonder what you can see in the picture, Werner is demonstrating an experimental feature in MuseScore which is currently in development. This unnamed feature will make it easier to transcribe a scanned score. The video below demonstrates it nicely. If you find a good name for this feature, let us know in the comments!

Original picture by Thomas Bonte, CC-by-nc.

MuseScore Player for Android is available

We are pleased to announce the release of the MuseScore Player for Android.

With the MuseScore Player app you can search through the more than 30,000 pieces of sheet music published on MuseScore.com. Scores are:

• Viewable at three levels of zoom
• Playable with adjustable tempo
• Downloadable for offline usage

You can also connect the app with your account on MuseScore.com and access your privately stored scores.

This app has been developed for smartphones firstly. Optimizations for tablet usage will arrive in forthcoming updates, as well as the ability to open external MuseScore (.mscz) files. You can post your feature requests in the Android group, or track the status of existing ones. The app runs on any mobile device with Android version 2.3.3 and above.

“I sing in an acapella group and can have my part available at all times on my phone! Thanks for doing such a professional job.” - PJRoberts

“Just what I have been looking for to put music at my finger tips! Thanks for creating such an awesome app!”  - Laura

The MuseScore Player app is available for a one time price of $4.99. It is common in the market of notation software that player apps are available at no cost, while their counterpart editors can cost up to $600. Hence, we believe it’s more beneficial to everyone to offer the mobile player apps at low cost, and maintain the free status of the editing software MuseScore.

Thank you for your support and enjoy having your sheet music collection always with you!

Image credits: Reunion by Marc Sabatella, licensed under CC-by.

What do you feel when listening to Bach?

On Sunday, Sept. 23, our Open Goldberg Variations partners Kimiko Ishizaka and Robert Douglass will be presenting at the “Glenn Gould Variations - Dreamers, Renegades, Visionaries” in Toronto, for the celebration of Gould’s 80th birthday (Gould died in 1982). Their message revolves around the importance of modern scores and modern score technology and how it can foster musical dialogue on the internet. Robert and Kimiko need your help demonstrating the point, and all you have to do is listen to Kimiko playing Bach, and tell us how it makes you feel and what things you associate with the music.

Here is how you can help:

1. Log on to MuseScore.com or get a free account if you don’t have one yet.
    
2. Now listen to the music while watching this score. Take note of the measures where you have thoughts, feelings, emotions, observations that you’d like to share.
    
3. Finally go to the score page and use the annotation tool to add your thoughts, feelings, emotions, observations to the score itself (see the screenshot with instructions below).

Your comments will become part of a montage that will accompany Kimiko as performs this work in Toronto!

Please take the time to do this today and tomorrow to make sure your comments make it to the performance!

This post is a reblog.

Interviewed by The Audio Podcast

Yesterday, we were interviewed by The Audio Podcast. It was a fun interview in which we gave insight in how MuseScore got started and how it’s being developed. We also briefly talk about what’s coming up next for MuseScore. Check out the video below.

Thanks Adam Jansch, Scott Mc Laughlin and Scott Hewitt for having us.

Sharing private sheet music with a secret link

Are you composing your next big piece and you want to share it with just a few people to get some feedback? Or you’re a teacher, making transcriptions with MuseScore which you only want to share with your students? It’s now very easy to share your private scores on musescore.com with a secret link.

For all your privately stored sheet music on musescore.com, there is a secret link which you can find via clicking on the Share button. People who you share this secret link with, will be able to see your score, listen to it, comment on it and download it. You also have the ability to reset a secret link, after which the original secret link will not work anymore. Instead you get a new secret link to share.

Hope this secret link will come in handy for you. Happy sharing!

Why we made MuseScore.com

Every now and then, people ask us why we are developing the sheet music sharing website MuseScore.com. Some also wonder why there is Pro membership required to upload unlimited amount of sheet music on the site. Both questions were answered quite some time ago in a post in which we explained our vision for MuseScore.

I wrote that post back in November 2010 and since many of our users may not have read it before, I wanted to reblog it. Also the comments on the original post are worth a read.

The State of MuseScore by Thomas Bonte on Nov 27th, 2010

Over the past years, we have been focusing on two major aspects of the MuseScore project: adding features and make MuseScore as stable as possible. We have really come a long way. With the launch of musescore.org in September 2008, things started to accelerate. It facilitated more interaction between users and developers on all levels: bug hunting, writing documentation, translating the software and much more.

Two years later, the results are phenomenal. From 2000 downloads in Aug 2008, MuseScore has grown to an astonishing 80000 downloads last month. This growth is something we can be very proud of. With these massive figures, MuseScore is on the verge of entering the top100 of most downloaded open source software world wide. If you checked the download graph carefully, you’ll notice that in the past 2 months, the download figures doubled. We attribute this to the elevated interest of music education in MuseScore.

This terrific news obviously introduces some new and steeper challenges. MuseScore users will expect that new releases are stable, that their old scores can be opened in new releases and still look the same. Also, the more features in MuseScore, the tougher it will become to get to a stable release within a decent time frame. And let’s not forget we need MuseScore running on several platforms. To sum up, MuseScore is becoming a huge project. We can only cope with it if we have some people behind the project who are fully dedicated to it.

I have been discussing this matter with Nicolas and Werner for quite some time now. At FOSDEM 2010, we came together for the first time in real life. While talking this through, it all came down to the simple fact that if we want to support and further develop MuseScore on a full time basis, there needs to be a business model in place. Since we didn’t want to touch the free & open nature of MuseScore, we thought we should try to create an online sheet music sharing platform. We announced it for the first time in April this year and while it’s still in alpha, you can take a look already at http://musescore.com. The business model behind this website will be similar as the one from Flickr.com: a subscription based service for more storage and features.

While we don’t know yet whether this business model will succeed, we took the plunge and have been spending full time now on the development of MuseScore, musescore.org and musescore.com. The basic idea is that the revenue made with musescore.com will fund some of the key people behind MuseScore. Initially this will be Werner, Nicolas and myself. This solution is somewhat similar to the Wordpress project, where some of the core Wordpress developers are on the payroll of Automattic, the company behind wordpress.com.

These are really exciting times for us. If we succeed, we’ll be able to make a living from our hobby and passion. And while doing so, MuseScore will further improve and grow.

This was 2010, but what are we doing today? Well for the coming months, we’ll be dividing our time and energy between the release of an alpha version of MuseScore 2.0 and bringing your sheet music to mobile Apple and Android devices. We’ll hope to bring you an update soon about both development tracks.

Making history with Wisconsin Public Radio

Yesterday we made radio history together with Wisconsin Public Radio and Open Goldberg. On June 24, 2012, WPR broadcast the entire Goldberg Variations recording made by Kimiko Ishizaka. At the same time, technologies for score following provided by MuseScore and SampleSumo were used to broadcast the score of the Goldbergs to anyone who was watching via a browser. The radio audience was instructed to visit opengoldberg.wpr.org, choose their radio station, and then watch the measures get highlighted in synchronicity with the broadcast of the radio.

So how did all of this work? Robert Douglass, director of the Open Goldberg Variations project, explains it very nicely while being interviewed for The Midday on WPR.

On the technology side of this experiment with WPR, we started working on the idea of score following during Music Hack Day New York in 2011 using our own MuseScore.com API. The rules of the hack day state that you get just 24 hours to hack up your prototype. Needless to say this wasn’t enough time to get the hack running as it’s supposed to do. It took us two more hack days, a few months later in Barcelona at Sonar and finally earlier this year in Cannes at MIDEM, before we had a stable and working solution. Below is a drawing of how the solution works, but there is also a video of Thomas Bonte explaining it at MIDEM.

Along the way, we also brought in the help of music technology company SampleSumo from Belgium. It is SampleSumo’s music following technology which does the listening and analyzing of the audio and defines the exact spot in the score where the performer is playing. In the particular case of the WPR experiment,  after connecting with the MuseScore server, listeners were served the digital score of the Goldberg Variations and saw the measures in the score being highlighted as the performance progressed.

It has to be said, while the score following worked perfect for listeners who tuned in via FM radio, the online listeners reported the score was lagging behind. This was in particular the case for listeners from overseas and it was caused by the network latency and/or the radio player buffer time. We already have some ideas how to improve this for a next time.

Here are some pictures from Robert in the WPR studio with the new MuseScore edition of the Goldberg Variations on his computer.

Thanks a lot to Robert Douglass, Matthew Tift and all the WPR people involved for making this happen!

If you missed the opportunity to hear on the radio and watch online the new public domain arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, you can still: 

Download the recording and the score for free
Download the free Open Goldberg app for iPad
Follow @OpenGoldberg and @WPR on Twitter
Like Open Goldberg Variations on Facebook  

Tune in for classical music radio you can watch

We are very pleased to partner with the Wisconsin Public Radio for a first-of-its-kind radio experiment.

Sunday, June 24 at 12:30pm, Wisconsin Public Radio will partner with Open Goldberg Variations and MuseScore to build on its tradition of innovation. For the first time in history, radio listeners will be able to follow the digital score of a broadcast recording as it is being played on air.

Be one of the first to hear Kimiko Ishizaka’s new public domain arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the radio and see the interactive MuseScore sheet music online, automatically following the radio broadcast.

You’ll need a computer with a high-speed internet connection to watch the sheet music and computer speakers or a traditional radio to listen to the broadcast.

Tune in Sunday via http://opengoldberg.wpr.org at your local time.

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