In MuseScore 4, many of the features and interfaces
have been revamped to make the overall experience
easier to use and more powerful, too.
So in this video, I’m going to give a very quick overview
of some of the major changes we’ve made to help you get up and running right away.
First, if you want to alter the appearance of MuseScore,
you can do this in the app preferences.
Here, you can change the overall theme as well as the accent colour.
In addition, we’ve also introduced a customisable high-contrast mode
to cater to various different kinds of visual impairment.
One of the most important changes to call out
is how you can manage instruments and part scores.
So, after you’ve created a new score, the list of instruments
will be represented in a new Instruments panel.
This panel allows you to rearrange,
hide or customise your instruments at any point.
Second, part scores can be accessed at any time
by clicking on this Parts button in the top bar,
and you’ll now be able to open and close them whenever you like.
If you wish to make changes to a part score,
for example, if you’d like the piano to be displayed in this violin part,
you can do this using the Instruments panel.
You can choose whatever instrument ordering you like
in a part score
without needing to worry about it affecting your main score.
For those coming from MuseScore 3,
the options to add or subtract staves or create linked staves,
which used to be found in the pop-up for adding or removing instruments,
have been moved to the new Instruments panel instead,
so you can see the effects of the changes you make.
Playback improvements are the single largest change
we’ve made to MuseScore 4.
Apart from our new Orchestra library,
we now have support for VST instrument plug-ins,
which can be applied to instruments using our new Mixer panel.
This panel also lets you easily switch between VSTi,
Soundfont or our new Orchestra library.
And you can apply VST effects here, too.
It’s worth mentioning
that we’re only just getting started with our support for VST instruments
and will be greatly expanding MuseScore’s capabilities
over the next few releases.
Due to issues with our old SFZ playback,
we took the decision to remove the Zerberus synthesiser.
For anyone who previously used SFZ files for playback in MuseScore 3,
we now recommend that you use a free VST sampler,
like Sfizz or Sforzando instead.
And please note that we’ll be including the ability
to create custom playback profiles in an upcoming release.
Some score interactions have also changed.
In particular,
you can now double-click on a measure to enter Note Input mode.
You can also now quickly isolate instruments
you’d like to hear during playback
by selecting one of its measures and pressing Play.
And you can hear a range of instruments
by selecting multiple relevant measures and pressing Play.
This will save you from needing to constantly keep turning on and off
the Solo and Mute buttons in the mixer.
If you want to hear full playback from any position,
simply select an element on the score, rather than a measure, and press Play.
We’ve also completely redesigned the Inspector panel,
which is now called Properties.
One of the first things you’ll notice about it
is that it’s docked on the left by default.
If you want to change this position, you can drag on the tab to move it —
next to the other panels or over to the other side of the screen.
The options in this panel have been somewhat re-organised.
When nothing is selected, it displays multiple useful options,
like the ability to show or hide empty staves
or various other types of score markings.
And if you select a measure, you’ll also see useful options
to add more measures or delete them quickly.
Where, in MuseScore 3,
you needed to select a single element type before you could make changes to it,
MuseScore 4 will always display relevant settings,
regardless of how many things are selected.
The Properties panel has two general options:
playback and appearance.
The Appearance option can be opened when you want to make precise changes
to things like leading space, minimum distance or offset.
The Playback option will display relevant playback settings
for any selected element.
Note that if an element doesn’t contain playback settings,
this option will be disabled.
So if you now add one of our new tempo lines to the score,
you can change how it speeds up or slows down here.
The popups which contain both playback and appearance settings
will remain open when you move from element to element
to minimise the number of times you need to reopen them.
It’s worth mentioning that we’re planning on
creating a new panel in future releases.
that will contain more sophisticated tools for editing playback,
so, to some extent this area of the Properties panel
is in a transitionary state and will be further improved over time.
For those entering and editing text,
we now keep all text options in one place in the Properties panel.
This is also where you’ll find the Insert special characters button, too.
Apart from that,
we’ve taken the two playback panels from MuseScore 3
and combined them into one,
which is now placed in the top-right corner.
If you undock this panel, it expands to include a scrubbing feature.
There are a few other key options that have switched to different positions.
Workspaces and the all-important Concert Pitch toggle
are now in the bottom bar,
alongside the viewing options for Page View and Continuous View.
It’s also important to point out that there are one or two features
which were technically incompatible with MuseScore 4,
which we’ll be rebuilding and re-introducing in upcoming releases.
In particular, the Documents side-by-side feature
and the Image Capture tool.
Lastly, due to the increased sophistication
of our audio engine,
it was necessary for us to alter MuseScore so that each project has its own window
to allow us to efficiently switch between the playback of different scores.
This has been a very quick overview of the changes we’ve made.
There’s lots more to go through,
including how to download and setup our new Orchestra library
as well as a description of our massive new engraving improvements,
both of which are covered in different videos.
One of the reasons we built MuseScore 4
was so that it had the right technical underpinning
to be able to make improvements much more quickly in future.
So you can expect to be seeing a lot more updates coming very soon.
And if you’re curious to learn about these when they happen,
please subscribe to this channel.
Thanks a lot and take care.