Today we are excited to announce the release of MuseScore 3, a major step forward for the world's most popular music notation software.

The strengths of MuseScore have long been its ease of use, the large community of creators and wide availability of sheet music on musescore.com, and of course, the fact that it is free. We are also proud of how powerful MuseScore is and the quality of the engraving that it can produce. With the release of MuseScore 3 - almost four years in the making - we are making it easier than ever to create beautiful, professional-looking scores.

Download MuseScore 3 Release

Automatic Placement

The most significant advance is the new Automatic Placement (autoplace) system that detects and avoids collisions between score elements.

This allows you to keep your focus on your music, with much less need to spend time manually adjusting things to look good. As you enter notes, musical symbols, and text, MuseScore 3 automatically formats your music and arranges the various markings in ways that closely follow professional music engraving standards.

You can continue to exercise full control of the layout when and where you want.

Autoplace does exactly what a professional engraver would do most of the time without your having to think about it, but it steps out of the way and lets you position things manually when appropriate. Users of other notation programs with similar functionality can attest to how valuable this can be.

Our automatic placement system strikes an ideal balance between simplicity and flexibility.

Autoupdate

An integration with Sparkle and WinSparkle autoupdate engines has been implemented and included in MuseScore 3. Keeping up to date with new releases no longer requires you to manually go find and download them. Just let the autoupdater handle downloading and installing of the new version for you! Receiving our latest bugfixes and features has never been easier.

Watch the video to see how it works on Windows.

Note, the autoupdater uses your OS locale which means that the language of the autoupdater interface will always be the same to your OS language.

First time user experience

MuseScore 3 introduces a number of other new features to make the program easier to learn and use.

To get you up and running quickly without the need for manuals, we have created a set of Tours that appear automatically and provide instant help on specific common topics as you first encounter them.

We have also added a search facility and better organization to the palettes, making it easier to find symbols to add to your score.

To customize the appearance and behavior of score elements, the various properties and styles associated with them can now be controlled almost entirely from an enhanced Inspector window. New properties are provided, such as placement above or below the staff, and stacking order to control how different elements overlap each other.

A new Timewise note input and editing feature allows you to insert and delete notes and rests within measures, automatically shifting subsequent music forwards or backwards. This can be useful for correcting mistakes as well as creating unmetered music.

Navigation

For navigation, a Single Page mode provides a vertically scrolling view of your score.

A new Timeline window provides an instant overview of your score, displaying the rehearsal marks, tempo, key, and time signature changes, and showing where each instrument is playing versus resting. This enables you to easily jump to specific sections of your score.

The Score Comparison Tool shows you the differences between two versions of a score.

Notation improvements

MuseScore 3 supports a number of additional notations that have been commonly requested.

The MuseJazz font can now be used to give all elements of your score a handwritten appearance.

System dividers can be added automatically.

Staff properties such as number of lines can be changed mid-score, and you can define a staff as a "cutaway" staff or to use named noteheads.

When generating parts from your score, you can have separate parts for each voice of a given staff.

Brand new Mixer and Piano Roll

The playback controls have been redesigned to increase their usefulness. The Play Panel is docked to take less space. In the Mixer, you can mute the voices for a staff individually. Multiple channels for an instrument are now collapsed by default, and you can define the MIDI port and channel number for each. The Piano Roll Editor has been greatly enhanced to make it much easier to edit the playback parameters of each note in your score.

Dark theme

MuseScore users can switch to Dark Mode to transform the UI to a darkened color scheme, putting the focus on the content while controls recede into the background. You don't need to restart MuseScore anymore to apply changed UI settings.

Acknowledgements

We are appreciate everyone's efforts to make MuseScore better. Thanks to everyone who submitted PRs and created bug reports as well as suggestions and feature requests.

Today, we want to introduce every contributor in personal. The list is available here and will be enriched soon. Don't hesitate to say thank you to someone personally :)

Contributions statistics in 2018

More than 1000 PRs were created, 860 PRs were merged

More than 50 contributors made about 1500 commits

Important notes