MuseScore is getting a new name!

• Gen. 30, 2024 - 10:22

Hi everyone,

Today we're sharing an important update to the name of the MuseScore desktop notation app. Starting in 2024, it will be called MuseScore Studio.

We’re aware that any product rebrand — even a relatively subtle one like this — rarely receives unanimous approval, especially when an app has such a long history and dedicated community. But rest assured, we’re making this change for very necessary reasons.

Why does the name need to change?

Muse Group currently supports three distinct products that include the name "MuseScore". As well as the MuseScore desktop app, there is MuseScore.com and the MuseScore mobile app. While our teams collaborate, all products cater to different audiences and use-cases.

This leads to frequent confusion and support issues, especially among new users. For example, many composers seeking the free desktop app unintentionally subscribe on the website.

So the name change to MuseScore Studio aims to better distinguish the desktop app, and clear up any confusion!

Why MuseScore Studio?

After careful consideration, we felt MuseScore Studio reflects the app's evolving capacity to support a complete suite of notation-centered compositional and arranging projects. The name also aligns with its powerful playback features and integrations for improved score sharing and collaboration. The version numbering remains intact, so we're currently at MuseScore Studio 4.2.

Why are we only renaming the desktop app for now? Renaming the MuseScore website or mobile app, which both include varied content libraries and feature sets, proved a rather more complex task. Rebranding the desktop app is a practical first step towards distinguishing the free desktop app from the other MuseScore products.

Is anything else going to change?

Rest assured, this name change does not alter our product roadmap. MuseScore Studio will continue to be an outstanding, free, and open-source app, dedicated to providing the best notation-centered experience with your continued support.

Thanks for your understanding and ongoing collaboration!

Commenti

• Gen. 30, 2024 - 13:08

I usually don't like changes, but I like this one !
It will help a lot to be able to recommend "MuseScore studio"
instead of "MuseScore program yes not the app yes it is an application though oh wait you have an iPad....".
Good decision !

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• Gen. 30, 2024 - 16:43

It feels like at least 20% of the posts here are about musescore.com, so this would be great!
Have you ever considered buying polyphone as well? I use it with musescore a lot.

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• Gen. 30, 2024 - 16:47

I'm very happy to see this finally be addressed. It was a problem long before musegroup. But I can't help but feel you are addressing it weird. Whenever anyone mentions "MuseScore" it's almost always in reference to the notation app. You can change it to "MuseScore Studio" if you like, but that kind of brand recognition isn't going away. People will always call it MuseScore. So are you really solving the problem? Honestly that's good thing. You have been working for years and years building the MuseScore brand. Even a minor change works against all that effort.

The problem is and always has been the score sharing website name. Therefore that is what should be changed. Yes, the website is what pays the bills, but its problem is its never had its own identity. It's always been second fiddle to the actual notation app. You aren't working against the same inertia there. So change it.

The mobile app, I know you have great plans for it. And I'm excited for what you come up with. But right now it's a nonentity and is a mobile app for the website. So it should take the name of the website.

I know I'm just a nobody, but this really doesn't make sense. I get that this technically was the simplest solution, but the score sharing website is still screaming to be its own thing and can be much better marketed separately.

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• Gen. 31, 2024 - 15:47

As for funding - MuseScore.com does put music first. It’s serves a hugely important purpose, one that has changed the lives of millions for the better, giving access to sheet music that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Completely independent of any question of monetization, MuseScore.com serves a vitally important function to society to an even greater extent than providing notation software does, since there are so many alternatives on the software front. Whereas there is nothing else remotely like MuseScore.com.

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• Gen. 31, 2024 - 15:35

If you only talk to other composers, then indeed you’ll find most of the people you talk to associate “MuseScore” with the notation software. But MuseScore.com is actually hugely popular, and the vast majority of people who are not composers really only know MuseScore because of the website.

Anyhow, to me the problem is that the word MuseScore by itself is ambiguous and means different things to different people. One can always refer to the software - or the website - by the more generic name, when speaking informally among people who already know the context. But it will be nice to have naming that allows one to easily be more precise when appropriate.

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• Feb. 1, 2024 - 02:13

I'll grant you, it is a solution. But it's a half measure. I don't think this does much to untangle the website from the notation software. If the majority of people are using the website, that is just all the more reason it should have its own identity. it would be so much easier to talk about it without everyone getting it confused with the notation software. And tacking Studio at the end of Musescore isn't going to cut it. "Oh you mean Musescore Studio!" It's just the same problem with .org vs .com but we have replaced ".org" with "studio".

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• Feb. 1, 2024 - 03:24

As mentioned in the announcement, this is but a "practical first step". In discussions on the Discord channel, it was also suggested further name changes are indeed planned. But, musescore.com is a tricky case because of the important of SEO for a huge database like that.

And actually, even just this first step does help different the sofrare from the support site musescore.org. Way too often people talk about musescore.com vs musescore.org as if musescore.org means the software. it doesn't, it's just a website. So now it is clear there are three entities here - msuescore.com, musescore.org, and MuseScore Studio. Nothing is just plain MuseScore any more, so that term by itself can more clearly be the official umbrella term for the whole ecosystem, while also continuing to be used informally when talking to one's friends to refer to whichever of those three you normally talk about.

Definitely not perfect by any means, but it's certainly not pointless either, and in any case, the people making these decisions don't take them lightly, and they have much more data to go on than any of us do, and all this "armchair quarterbacking" is probably worth about as much as it will be int he upcoming Super Bowl...

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• Gen. 30, 2024 - 18:16

I bristled initially when I read the first sentence, but after reading the whole post I'm in agreement that this is a good decision. I'm not sure I like the word "Studio" it seems a bit of the time, but it's better than nothing.

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• Gen. 31, 2024 - 16:57

On reflection I think that this rebranding is a good thing. The MuseScore name is rightly being retained and I think that "Studio" immediately makes it clear that this is where you go to create scores, thereby differentiating it from the iPad/Android players and the score sharing site.

It would be ideal if there could be a musescore-studio.org site as well but maybe this will happen eventually. As already mentioned, a change to the webpage banner colour would be a nice touch.

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• Feb. 6, 2024 - 12:42

We started with the ability to save scores to the cloud in v.4.0.
musescore.com now has an improved "invite to view" flow, as well as the option to display parts.
This means you can invite someone to view one of your private scores, and they can get access to their part directly on musescore.com.
There's more to come here too. We're just getting started :-)

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• Feb. 14, 2024 - 18:33

I support this decision and also recommend renaming the other "MuseScore" to something more specific (MuseScore Share? MuseScore Library? MuseScore Sheets?).

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• Feb. 15, 2024 - 12:50

The namechange might solve the confusion with musescore.com but I would have thought the onus was on them to change their name.
However, "Studio" carries its own associations and obligations. If it is to resemble Microsoft Visual Studio to be a sort of IDE it should be able to :
- handle multiple scores simultaneously
- handle different types of documents
e.g. edited texts,
- enable smoothe WorkFlows instead
of laborious workarounds
- enable copy and paste of pages and
combinations of scores
- enable creation of plugins, as existed
in previous versions of museScore
- handle version management of scores
- a debugging tool to iron out corrupted scores

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• Feb. 15, 2024 - 17:12

I'm not quite sure about the comparison with Visual Studio (an entirely different kind of app), but many of the issues you've pointed out are already things that we either know about (e.g. plugin creation), are already working on (improving user workflows), or can't necessarily do within our current architecture (e.g. copy and paste pages – although you can obviously copy and paste an entire page of notation).
So rest assured, we are actively working on making MuseScore Studio the best notation app it can be.
As explained above, changing the name of MuseScore.com was not an option at this stage due to impact on SEO.

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• Feb. 18, 2024 - 14:04

Can you explain what you mean? MuseScore 4 certainly supports multiple documents simultaneously - it's indeed a very essential feature. Maybe you mean the ability to do a split screen view so two are visible at once within the same window? MuseScore 4 places them in separate windows so you can use your usual OS facilities to position the windows as you like, quickly Tab between them, etc. I find this to be a great improvement, but I gather that on macOS specifically, this has the unfortunate side effect of also showing multiple program icons on the dock - maybe that is what you are referring to? Solutions to that particular limitation are being investigated.

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• Feb. 18, 2024 - 16:09

I meant MDI (Multiple Documents Interface) which was the standard until MS4, in contrast to SDI (Single Document Interface) which is now used in MS4. There are many reasons to use MDI, the main one being a smoothe Rational WorkFlow, where you can visually compare versions side by side. In addition, MS3 also had a comparison function which made this even simpler, showing the differences between versions and enabling some basic version management of scores.

Tabbing between windows is cumbersome, doesn't show documents side-by-side, makes cut&paste something of a guess when scores are not visually in the same window.

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• Feb. 19, 2024 - 17:17

The reasons for the current multi-instance structure are largely to support the new playback engine, which obviously is significantly more capable than what was available in MU3.
We are of course aware that the current multi-instance requires optimising (especially from a UX POV). This is on our radar, but is not something we have been able to prioritise lately due to other more pressing improvements and feature requests.
Meanwhile, we are actively pursuing score version management features, so please look out for information about these in forthcoming announcements.

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• Feb. 20, 2024 - 00:52

An improved design IMO, especially now that the application carries the name studio, would have:
1. a single application instance, able to open multiple projects/scores
2. a single instance of the playback engine capable to handle interactions with all open projects/scores
3. viewing capability with horizontal/vertical splits independent of projects and parts (think QtCreator). That is:
- two parts (of the same project or not) might be viewed simultaneously in two different splits
- a single score (or part) might also be viewed simultaneously in two different splits. For example, two different views of the same score at different measures. I miss that feature greatly when dealing with repeated structures (e.g. ABA) that contain variations (elements present in pretty much all western music and songs) and have to resort to exporting a PDF and opening the PDF on the side to have a poor man's view of two views of the same score.

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• Feb. 20, 2024 - 11:24

I would love to see these improvements too – believe me, we all would.
As always, it's a question of resources. These improvements require some pretty significant architectural changes, so it's not something that we can tackle in the short-medium term.
But we will definitely be looking into this again as soon as we finish rolling out some major features that have been requested a lot of us since 4.0 came out.
Thanks for your patience, and your feedback!

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• Feb. 21, 2024 - 08:04

Here are some nuisance bugs/features which should be corrected:
1-panels on the left don't close with a standard X but have … which displays a menu of options in order to close

2-the shortcuts W/Q for shortening/extending a note jump to the next note instead of the note entered

3-when displaying lists in panels pressing a letter doesn't scroll through the list. The mouse has to be used to scroll through the list

4-when using the vertical spacers in the layout options there is no line indicating the spacing and it is difficult to see the drag box to change the distance

5-when entering system/stave text that starts with a single letter between A and G with/without accidentals these are interpreted as chords and not as text

6-when editing text one needs to open the cumbersome Properties panel instead of having the immediate contextual toolbar at the bottom of the window, as existed in all previous versions of musescore. Also, none of the shortcuts work for text, e.g. B(old), I(talics), etc.

7-there is no debugging tool for correcting errors especially in imported scores from musicxml

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• Feb. 21, 2024 - 08:23

Hello, i'm a normal user, this is what i think:
1 this is by design, a more modern design seen in many (web) apps today
3 i can type letters and the list moves to the corresponding entry
4 spacers do show a line for me. Perhaps zoom in a little for the drag box?
5 no such bug for me everything i input is plain text
6 again this is the new design
7 you mean the little import window from 3.x? Yes this is not (yet) implemented.

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• Feb. 21, 2024 - 09:22

I want to thank everyone here for your feedback.

It would be really helpful for us if we could move this conversation to the support forum, and raise specific feature requests or reproducible bugs via our issue tracker on GitHub.

Unfortunately, this feedback won't get the attention it deserves from the development team on this page.

Your feedback on the product name change is of course welcome.

Many thanks.

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• Mar. 2, 2024 - 19:31

Along w/ that update, more dynamics should be added such as sfff from Stravinsky's rite of spring, sfffz from star wars by John Williams, having the long trills not cut out short on all the instruments (including flute 2 from musesounds woodwinds), Stravinsky's rite of spring has trills w/ a stacatto quarter note at the end of them w/ a tie & those should playback properly in the next update.

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• Mar. 7, 2024 - 13:39

(I am writing the comment here as there is no feature to comment on Handbook pages.)

There is a problem with your German translation of "Working with Multiple Voices" in the Handbook 4. It seems to have updated the English version instead of the German one.

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• Mar. 7, 2024 - 15:04

I'm also hoping that the Musesounds strings (along w/ the added solo double bass, 3rd violin, 3rd violins section etc. extended ranges for all the instruments) would have muted string sounds because a mute on the bridge of a bowed stringed instrument does create a particular sound.

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• Mar. 7, 2024 - 16:20

Thanks everyone for the feedback and discussion on this page. I'm closing it for further comments, but any feature-related requests or discussions can certainly carry on in our dedicated forums and issue tracker. Thank you!

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