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.
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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.
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assets: Graphical assets, use them if you need a MuseScore icon. For logo, color, etc., see https://musescore.org/en/about/logos-and-graphics.
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awl: Audio Widget Library, from the MusE project.
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build: Utility files for build.
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bww2mxml: Command line tool to convert BWW files to MusicXML. BWW parser is used by MuseScore to import BWW files.
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demos: A few MuseScore files to demonstrate what can be done.
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fluid: Clone of FluidSynth@sourceforge, ported to C++ and customized. Code now at fluidsynth@github.
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fonts: Contains fontforge source (sfd) + ttf/otf fonts. MuseScore includes the "Emmentaler" font from the Lilypond project.
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libmscore: Data model of MuseScore.
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mscore: Main code for the MuseScore UI.
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msynth: Abstract interface to Fluid + Aeolus.
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mtest: Unit testing using QTest.
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omr: Optical music recognition.
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share: Files moved to /usr/share/... on install.
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test: Old tests. Should move to mtest.
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vtest: Visual tests. Compare reference images with current implementation.
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thirdparty: Contains projects which are included for convenience, usually to integrate them into the build system to make them available for all supported platforms.
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thirdparty/rtf2html: Used for capella import. Clone from rtf2html@sourceforge, code now at rtf2html@github.
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thirdparty/dtl: Used for the score comparison tool. Diff Template Library.
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thirdparty/ofqf: OSC server interface. Based on OSC for Qt4, code now at ofq@github.
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thirdparty/singleapp: Clone from Qt Single Application.
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thirdparty/portmidi: Clone from PortMidi.
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thirdparty/beatroot: It's a core part of BeatRoot Vamp Plugin by Simon Dixon and Chris Cannam, used in MIDI import for beat detection.
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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!