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!
- 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
MuseScore is licensed under GPL version 2.0. See LICENSE.GPL in the same directory.
Read the developer handbook for a complete build walkthrough and a list of dependencies.
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 the Releases page, and then from your download directory type:
tar xzf MuseScore-x.x.x.tar.gz
cd MuseScore-x.x.x
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.
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.
To install to default prefix using root user, type:
sudo make install
A debug version can be built by doing make debug instead of make release.
To run the debug version, type:
./build.debug/mscore/mscore
See mtest/README.md or the developer handbook for instructions on how to run the test suite.
The new script testing facility is also available to create your own automated tests. Please try it out!
Run ./hooks/install.sh to install a pre-commit hook that will format your staged files. Requires that you install uncrustify.
If you have problems, please report them. To uninstall, run ./hooks/uninstall.sh.