(Software Review) MuseScore

MuseScore is a music scorewriter for Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac. MuseScore is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, complete with support for score playback and import/export of MusicXML and standard MIDI files. Percussion notation is supported, as is direct printing from the program.



The program has a clean user interface, with fast note editing input similar to the step-time note entry found in the popular commercial Scorewriting software packages, Finale and Sibelius. MuseScore is free software, published under the GNU General Public License.

MuseScore is able to import and export from many different music formats, including MIDI and MusicXML, as well as the importing of files from the commercial music arranging software, Band-in-a-Box. It is able to produce engraved output as a PDF, SVG or PNG document, or alternatively, music can be exported to LilyPond for subsequent tweaking of the output.

In September 2008, MuseScore started to see a large growth in the number of downloads following the launch of the musescore.org website. By December 2008, the monthly download rate was 15,000. In the summer of 2009 the release of version 0.9.5 added support for Mac OS and was stable enough for normal use. Download traffic for MuseScore tripled in the four months time following the 0.9.5 release. Since October 2009, MuseScore is downloaded more than 1000 times per day.