Rosegarden 11.02 and MuseScore 1.0 released

Well, we did say there will be news on big content production software published, didn’t we? New versions of Rosegarden, a MIDI sequencer and score editor, and MuseScore, simply a score editor were released one after another over last several days.

For Rosegarden this is mostly maintenance release with bugfixes that however features one big change: a much saner way to handle tied notes in the pianoroll editor. Such notes now have a subtle pattern fill and are treated as one whole thing. Additionally banks for Kurzweil PC3 and 2500RS, Kawai CA9 MT1 and MT2, as well as Roland SonicCell were added. Rosegarden’ primary target platfroms are Linux and UNIXes.

For MuseScore this is the first formally stable release after over 8 years of work. Originally MuseScore was an internal score editor in MIDI sequencer called MusE. It was decided in 2002 to make it a standalone project, and over years MuseScore has become primary project for Werner Schweer — its principal developer. You can read a very reasonable review of MuseScore by Marc Sabatella here.

Feature-wise MuseScore is just like Finale Notepad plus scripting (JavaScript), but without tabulatures. The team is up to many things: from actually implementing tabulatures for 2.0 (including custom fonts that represent various historical tabulature styles and support for Guitar Pro files) to mobile market and even web services. It’ very interesting project to watch especially given it’ strong focus on work with community (it’ how user interface in 35 languages and user manual in 16 languages became a reality). MuseScore is written primarily for Windows, Mac and Linux.