MuseScore.com - Blog

Second public review of the Goldberg Variations

After having received more than 500 comments and annotations on the first public review, the MuseScore edition of the Goldberg Variations is now available for the second public review: Goldberg Variations 2nd public review 

We welcome you to check out the score and submit annotations in case you spot an issue.

Read more: Recording the Goldberg Variations at the Teldex Studio

Promoting MuseScore at open source conference FOSDEM 2012

This past weekend we have been evangelizing MuseScore at FOSDEM 2012  in Brussels. FOSDEM is the largest free & open source software conference in Europe and attracts more than 5000 visitors.

This event is always a great opportunity for us gather as we are a distributed team: Werner works in Germany, Nicolas in France and Thomas in Belgium. At the same time, we can connect with MuseScore users and fellow software developers. We always come back from FOSDEM with a lot of energy and new ideas.

Here are some pictures of our weekend. 

Join us creating the Ultimate Christmas Songbook

With Christmas around the corner, we have this little idea to collect the world’s favorite Christmas songs on MuseScore.com. Therefore, we created a group: Ultimate Christmas Songbook. We welcome everyone to post public domain Christmas songs in this group. In order to do so, become a member of the group first.

Once you have uploaded a score to your account, adding it to the group is easy: click on the “Add to/remove from group” link next to the score.

As a reward, each contributor will get a coupon for the Ultimate Christmas Songbook app for iPad in which your score will be added!

Join us for a talk on the future of sheet music

Please join us this Friday for the next meeting of the Digital Musicoloy Study Group in which Thomas Bonte and Nicolas Froment of MuseScore share their vision for the future of sheet music:

MuseScore: Giving your sheet music a social life

Friday, November 4, 3 pm
Room 4-152
Maclaurin Building
MIT
Cambridge, MA, USA 

Directions and Map: whereis.mit.edu/?go=4

Co-organized by Matthias Röder and MIT’s Hyperstudio

Free and open to the public!


The life of printed sheet music started in Germany when included in the Mainz psalter in 1457. It has been hooked to paper ever since. Up to now. Sheet music is about to get a new life. A truly digital and social one. With the free and easy to use music notation software MuseScore, everyone can create beautiful sheet music. While this isn’t a remarkable fact, it’s really just the prerequisite to move sheet music beyond paper. What about sharing sheet music on Facebook? Or making mashups with your sheet music and any YouTube video? Or holding your complete sheet music collection in the palm of you hand with your smartphone or tablet? This all becomes possible with the open source technology MuseScore.

Thomas Bonte (Belgium) and Nicolas Froment (France) co-founded a startup together with Werner Schweer (Germany) to drive the future of the leading free & open source notation software MuseScore. The three found each other online, sharing the same passion for software development & music. Having worked together on the MuseScore project for a couple of years, they first gathered in 2009 in Brussels to discuss the future of the open source project. One year later, MuseScore tripled its monthly download rate to more than 100.000 downloads per month, which can be mainly attributed to the elevated interest of music education world wide. In 2011, the three formed a startup to develop a sheet music sharing website for MuseScore users with a freemium based business model. The mission is to make the sheet music experience truly digital across the desktop, web and mobile devices.

Want sheet music on your phone?

Some time ago, we released a MuseScore Viewer for iPad. It was our first experience making a mobile app and we learned a lot. Today we want to raise the bar and make a MuseScore Player app, so we can view and listen to our scores. Also, this player app will be for iOS and Android devices.

In case you wish to be notified when the app is ready, leave your email address at

• musescore.com/iphone
• musescore.com/android

Sharing sheet music on Facebook

MuseScore.com is a great tool to share sheet music with your friends on Facebook. Not only does it let them view sheet music, but also listen to it.

The only thing you need to do is grab the link of the score page, e.g. musescore.com/user/15799/scores/28652 and paste it in a Facebook status update. Facebook automatically adds the thumbnail and some info:

After you posted the update, you and your friends will see this:

Notice the play button? Click on it and you’ll be able to see and listen to the score.

Get a nice profile link musescore.com/your-name

Have you noticed already that some profile links have their name in the url like like musescore.com/nicolas? It looks much better than the impersonal musescore.com/user/5, not? Here is how you can set your own nice profile link.

After you logged in, click on the Settings link in the top menu and submit your profile link:

As you can see, setting your own profile link is uber easy. Be aware however, when you set your profile link, you can’t change it anymore so choose wisely.

Tracking the popularity of your sheet music

With the recent launch of MuseScore.com, a new featured was introduced: statistics. Each score page shows you 3 numbers: views, favorites, comments. 

Let’s take “My Second Publish” as an example, which is a rather popular composition by young composer Trumviolpianclar:

His score has been viewed 2377 times, 35 members on MuseScore.com favorited the score and it has received 56 comments so far.

But what about the number of plays or downloads you may think. If you have a Pro Account, you can click further on the number of views and you end up on a more detailed overview. See a screenshot of this overview below.

A view is counted when someone has seen the score, a play is counted when someone actually hit the playback button and a download is counted when either the MuseScore file, the PDF or the MusicXML file is being downloaded. The counting is not done real time by the way, there is a short delay to make sure the counter can not be gamed.

A count is added for anonymous as well as people logged in on MuseScore.com, so everyone. Currently, this includes the author’s activity on his/her own scores as well, but in a next iteration we’ll be excluding this activity. This way, the statistics on your own scores are counted for everyone except yourself.

Embedding your scores in your blog

This is no doubt the score of the day, made by Piotr Tomasz Harasimiuk. You can view and listen to the score right in this blog. But what about your blog? Read on to find it out, but first, let’s listen to this great arrangement.

Angry birds fuga con barok style by Piotr Tomasz Harasimiuk

So how can you do this yourself? Just look for the Share button next to any score and copy the embed code into your html text editor. Super great feature!
 

MuseScore.com has launched!

We have great news! After being more than one year in development mode, MuseScore.com is ready for its official launch.

Today, you will find MuseScore.com in a shiny new design. The score page and the user profile especially have been drastically improved. Additionally, we’ve added statistics to track the popularity of your scores, and you can now embed your scores, follow other members and much more - all features you asked for. We like it, we hope you do too!

This launch is also an important personal moment for us, the MuseScore team. For the past 3 years, we have spent our time and passion to grow the MuseScore project and not without success. So today we finally hope we can make a dream come true which is to make a living from our hobby and keep on developing MuseScore. We are therefore introducing a Pro Account on MuseScore.com.

MuseScore.com will always offer a free account, but your 5 recent uploaded scores will be displayed. A Pro Account will give you unlimited upload and access to detailed statistics. Pro Accounts are available for a yearly subscription of $49, which is around $4 per month.

For our current users, we’ve put a grace period in place which ends on November 1st, 2011. During this period you can still upload and access your scores even if you have passed the limit already. But after November 1st, only your 5 most recent uploads will remain accessible. Don’t worry, we safely store your scores until you decide to upgrade.

To celebrate our launch, there is a discounted price for the first 100 subscribers: $29 instead of $49 for the first year. You can upgrade at musescore.com/upgrade

As always, your feedback and suggestions are very welcome at support@musescore.com.

Hope to see you on MuseScore.com!

Thomas, Nicolas, & Werner