One of the biggest improvements we've made in MuseScore 4 has to do with the engraving –
– the way the scores themselves look.
Actually it's not one big improvement, but rather hundreds of tiny little improvements
that will make your scores appear more polished and professional.
If you're opening a score from an older version of MuseScore, you may notice some differences.
This video briefly shows you how your scores might be affected.
We've made some significant changes to beams, slurs and ties,
horizontal spacing, and page layout.
These changes have meant re-writing some of our engraving algorithms
and setting new default positions for various kinds of notated elements.
So if in an earlier version of MuseScore you found yourself manually adjusting
something like this beam because you didn't like its default position,
then those manual adjustments may appear differently in MuseScore 4
because the default positions for beams have now changed.
Or here, for example, where the spacing between these notes is pretty inconsistent.
You might have previously tried to adjust the layout stretch
or the leading space to fix this.
In MuseScore 4, we've had to reset the layout stretch so our new horizontal
spacing system can work its magic. Now these notes look consistently spaced, by default.
You might have also moved slurs like these, for example,
so that they're closer to their associated note stems or beams.
Slurs in MuseScore 4 will now adopt these positions automatically.
The good news is that our new default positions across the board
are much better than they were before,
meaning you'll need to make far fewer manual adjustments in your new scores.
And while we do try to preserve as much of the manual customisation
you might have previously made, we'd like to encourage you now to
manually reset these styles when you open your older scores in MuseScore 4.
Resetting your styles is really easy:
First, go to Format > Style and then click "Reset all styles to default".
And as an additional step, select everything by using Control A (or Command A on a Mac),
and then go to Format > Reset shapes and positions.
Now your score will use our new default positions and improved algorithms.
For a more thorough look at all our engraving improvements,
and how they might affect your older scores,
check out this detailed article on the MuseScore.org website
(linked in the description below). And as always,
be sure to subscribe to this channel to learn about new updates
and feature improvements in MuseScore.