Engraving Improvements in MuseScore 4: How They Affect Your Older Scores

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.