In case you didn’t see it, MuseScore made a big announcement last month.
MuseScore 4. Moving from notation software to composition software. | MuseScore:
Although notation is always of paramount importance to MuseScore, we want to expand our capabilities to include other areas of modern composition: experimentation, sharing & collaboration, working with mixed media, sophisticated organisation and being able to produce high-quality audio. MuseScore 4 is the first step in achieving this expanded focus.
However, this does not mean that we are going to start adding new features at the expense of existing ones. In order to achieve our goals, we need to look ‘inwards’ first. Armed with two years of user feedback on MuseScore 3, we have begun the process of making significant improvements to almost all aspects of the application: improved engraving defaults, simplification of the interface, more powerful functionality and an overhaul of its appearance, to name a few.
I don’t use MuseScore often, but I know it is widely respected as a lightweight and accessible notation editor. It really resonates with a lot of the teachers in my district, particularly those who are comfortable with using apps over web browsers to compose, and who don’t want something over the top and expensive like Sibelius or Finale.
This is exciting news for MuseScore and I am curious to see where their development goes.
Some of the folks from MuseScore appeared on a recently released episode of the Scoring Notes podcast, which I haven’t listened to yet, but suspect they go into more detail about the transition to version 4.
