MuseScore
More info
- Creator
- Werner Schweer
- Released
- 2002
- Owner
- Muse Group
- Type
- Scorewriter
- License
- GPL
- Website
- musescore.org
The free scorewriter that made notation software available to everyone who didn't want to pay for Sibelius or Finale.
MuseScore started in 2002 when Werner Schweer split the notation view out of his Linux sequencer, MusE. It is written in C++ with Qt, licensed under the GPL, and reads and writes MusicXML, which makes it a common waypoint when scores move between programs.
In 2017 the project was acquired by Ultimate Guitar, which later became Muse Group and also took over Audacity. MuseScore 4 arrived in 2022 with a redesigned interface and sampled instrument sounds, and the gap to the commercial competition narrowed noticeably. Most of the friction since has been about the musescore.com site and its copyright takedowns, not the program itself.