Hi there, my name is Martin Keary and I'm delighted to announce the release of MuseScore 4,
a gigantic overhaul that touches on... well, everything! Let me show you.
First, it has a completely new look. The light and dark themes have both
been revamped and they have customisable accent colours too.
And for those with visual impairment, you can turn on a customisable high-contrast mode.
Along with the visual changes, we've spent a lot of time improving the experience to help
you find things more easily and notate faster. For example, the top bar now contains tuplets
and articulations and has many more options that you can show or hide by clicking here.
We've completely redesigned the Inspector, which we've renamed 'Properties' and have
added all kinds of little features and improvements so that it's much more
useful than before. It's also much smarter. No matter how many things you select on you score,
it will always be able to display relevant options so you can change them quickly.
We've also simplified the system for opening and customising part scores. Select 'Parts' up here,
choose the part you want and - using this new instruments panel - you can show any
accompanying instruments you'd like to see,
rearrange them and alter their settings too. And by the way you can also use this instruments
panel to add staves or create linked staves, which is really useful for guitar tablature.
Now, here's a hallelujah moment for you: MuseScore finally support the playback of tempo lines,
like accelerando and ritardando.
We've also improved the link with MuseScore.com,
which makes it easier for you to save your work to the cloud privately.
You can then choose to publish your work on MuseScore.com once your score is complete
But we're only getting started.
Next is the gigantic overhaul we've made to our engraving. Sheet music in MuseScore has
been transformed so that it's now highly professional by default. One aspect of this is our new system
for horizontal spacing. To give just one example of how much this improves things:
consider this notation from MuseScore 3 which now looks like this.
We've also rewritten our systems for beaming, slurs, ties and cross-staff notation.
Apart from that the positioning of hundreds of different symbols are much better than before.
Dynamics are positioned more accurately by default, You can customize notation to have straight or
traditional flags. We've added new notation fonts, like Maestro and Broadway - and
we've significantly improved and expanded our own flagship notation font, Leland.
But we're still not done because I've not yet mentioned the biggest change of all,
which is that MuseScore has an entirely new audio engine and playback system. This has enabled us
to support VST instruments and effects, which can be assigned via our new mixer, like this. An even
more exciting consequence of our audio engine can be found by opening our new Muse Hub application,
where you'll see something called Muse Sounds, which is an orchestral plugin we've spent two
years developing. Once Muse Sounds is installed, playback will no longer sound like this:
It will sound like this:
It requires no customisation or complex mapping to set up and it's free.
MuseScore 4 is the result of a dedicated collaboration between my team and the open
source community, who provided us with endless help on design and
implementation as well as translations, documentation and support for users.
For those who want to get up and running as fast as possible, we've released multiple tutorials,
which can be accessed from within MuseScore 4 itself or by searching this channel.
with MuseScore 4, we've now got the sophisticated technical foundation we
need to build new features with much greater speed in future. There are a lot of big things coming
soon and if you're interested in finding out about them, please subscribe to this channel.
Thanks a lot and take care!