Muse Group announced the release of MuseScore Studio 4.5 featuring easy dynamics insertion, a brand-new percussion palette, and new engraving features.
There’s a release video showing off most of the new features:
Let’s take a quick look at the main changes.
Dynamics
You can now select a note, press Ctrl/Cmd+D, and select a dynamics option right below the note, then drag the crescendo/decrescendo hairpin.
What’s great is that if you already have a dynamics marking, single-clicking it will open the very same panel where you can choose a different marking.
Percussion input
This has been completely revamped. For percussion instruments, you now have rows of pads with human-readable names. Clicking a pad inserts a note in place.
You can switch to notes if you like. To do that, click Layout and choose Notation preview instead.
Easy bar copy/pasting
If you need to quickly copy an entire bar and paste it elsewhere, there’s a new method:
- Click to select an entire bar you want to copy
- Press and hold Ctrl/Cmd
- Drag to the target bar, MuseScore Studio will highlights beats
- Release the mouse button
You get some granularity there: you don’t have to drop at the exact start of a bar, you can skip a beat or two. In that case, MuseScore Desktop will insert rests at the beginning automatically to accommodate for that.
New engraving features
There are some new engraving features in MuseScore Studio:
- Text elements between two staves now show up above bar lines, masked.
- Laissez vibrer ties are now supported (the feature request goes back to 2012)
- Courtesy clefs, key, and time signatures at repeats and jumps are now possible (controls are in the Style dialog).
- You can finally use the Style dialog to define large time signatures such as ⅞ to use in the composition.
Caveats
I haven’t used notation editors and MuseScore Desktop specifically for quite some time. So my feedback is based on just trying new features in this new version of the program.
While all the changes are really great, there are some issues. I can’t get the Style dialog to open here on Linux: it blinks for a split second and disappears immediately, and the same goes for Page Settings and Transpose dialogs (filed #27128).
The new Percussion panel shows up undocked the first time (someone else already reported it, although for macOS).
The MIDI device selection is still not great. The list only shows devices rather than ports. This is a problem with some modern MIDI devices that expose multiple ports. For instance, I have four ports on Minilab3 and two on Launchpad X here (filed #27127).
Moreover, it’s still not possible to use multiple devices for input. It makes sense to use a grid controller like a Launchpad for adding percussion notation and then a regular keyboard for everything else. Alas, that’s for later, I guess.
Lastly, VST3 support on Linux is still not working in upstream MuseScore Desktop. It appears that there is a technical problem sitting between Qt and VST SDK that hasn’t been solved yet. This has been partially fixed in a soft fork by diedeno (v4.5.0 build is available): it will open user interfaces for VST3 plugins built with JUCE, but not any others.
Overall, I still really like where the project is heading. There have been reasonable complaints that MuseScore 4.x got worse in terms of engraving, but the team is clearly paying attention to this part of the feature set.
Bradley Kunda posted develoment plan for the next year or two back in December last year, check it out!
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