MuseScore 3.6 - A Massive Engraving Overhaul!

00:09 - And I’m delighted to announce our latest version, MuseScore 3. 6: a release that’s all about engraving improvements.

00:16 - We’ve spent months working on a significant overhaul to the appearance of our sheet music, providing you with much more professional-looking defaults.

00:22 - The best way of demonstrating what we’ve done is to compare it to a previous version.

00:27 - So let’s open MuseScore 3. 5 and set up a new score.

00:30 - First, I’ll add the title, composer name and copyright info and then I’ll add a few instruments.

00:34 - I definitely want a Horn in here… oh, and I’d like a Violin and a Cello as well.

00:39 - Hmm, I forgot about the Piccolo and Flute; I’d like those, too.

00:42 - And, you know what? Let’s have a Trombone and also a B♭ Clarinet.

00:46 - Right, let’s go! And pretty much immediately you can see problem no. 1, which is that the instruments have all appeared in the order that I added them and have not been arranged correctly at all.

00:55 - Horn, Cello, Flute, Trombone, Clarinet, Piccolo, Violin… yeah, that’s pretty miserable, not to mention there’s no bracketing of instrument groups either, which makes for an extremely incomplete-looking score.

01:06 - It is of course possible to manually adjust all these things, but not only is that a little bit tedious — and dare I say it… annoying! — it also adds an unnecessary learning curve for younger users who are only starting out on their compositional journey.

01:18 - In addition, the margins on this page are a little bit cramped.

01:21 - The typeface, which is a Times New Roman clone, is not especially nice to look at.

01:25 - You’ll also notice this large gap at the bottom of the page, which can only be fixed by adding spacers between each instrument.

01:32 - Now let’s open MuseScore 3. 6 and set up the same score.

01:35 - First you’ll notice that as I add new instruments, they’re automatically ordered according to standard orchestral convention, which you can see here in this dropdown, this contains other conventions too, like Marching Band, for example.

01:46 - This doesn’t prevent you from making unique customisations, by the way.

01:49 - In addition, you can now mark instruments as soloists, which will be positioned accordingly on the score, Now if we look at our score, you’ll see a lot of things have changed.

01:57 - First, that large gap has gone. This is because we’ve now introduced an automatic spacing system that picks the best-possible default layout to suit your page size and ensemble type.

02:06 - If we look closer you can also see that along with the correct ordering, the instrument families have also been bracketed together accurately too.

02:13 - You’ll also notice that our page margins have been updated to more closely match those used in published scores.

02:18 - Then there’s our new typeface, Edwin, which is an open license version of New Century Schoolbook — long a favourite of professional publishers, like Boosey and Hawkes.

02:26 - But since there’s no music written yet, you’ll be forgiven for missing the largest change of all: our new notation font: Leland, which is named after Leland Smith, the creator of the now-abandoned application SCORE which was known for the amazing quality of its engraving.

02:39 - We’ve spent a lot of time finessing this font to be a world-beater.

02:42 - If you want to watch a video about how it was made, you’ll find the link in the description.

02:46 - In combination, these defaults will transform the appearance of sheet music in MuseScore.

02:50 - If you want to apply them to your existing scores, then open them in MuseScore 3. 6 and first apply the new typeface and notation style in this dialogue.

02:57 - If you want to take advantage of our improved spacing, then go to Styles and choose ‘Reset All Styles to Default’.

03:03 - For extra credit, you might also want to choose this option to hide empty staves too.

03:07 - If you’ve spent a lot of time using page breaks and spacers in previous versions of MuseScore, it is advisable to remove them first to let the vertical spacing system do its thing.

03:15 - You can then make any changes you see fit afterwards.

03:17 - In general, you’ll find that our new system requires a lot less manual tweaking, with much better overall results.

03:23 - Lastly, if you want to avail of our automatic instrument ordering and bracketing, then open the Instruments panel by going to Edit/Instruments — you can also press the shortcut ‘I’ to do this — and change the ordering to your preferred convention.

03:36 - It’s worth also mentioning that although these new defaults mark a giant step in the engraving quality of MuseScore, we’re by no means done and you’ll be seeing further big advancements in the future.

03:46 - In addition to these large changes, there are dozens of improvements that have been added too.

03:50 - If you’d like to read through the full release list, the link is in the description.

03:53 - Lastly, I’d like to offer a massive ‘Thank You’ to our community, who have spent enormous amounts of time building and testing many of the features we’re announcing today, with a special mention going out to Niek van den Berg who collaborated on many of these large changes with our engraving expert, Simon Smith.

04:07 - MuseScore is a truly wonderful open-source project and the community is its super power.

04:11 - We hope you enjoy the numerous engraving changes we’ve introduced in MuseScore 3. 6.

04:16 - And, as always, there’s much more to come!.