Before I begin, I'd like to welcome Crazy2be to the small groups of writers. Sure, he has officially been on the staff almost since the beginning, but only just recently made his first post. Crazy2be, we look forward to reading your thoughts!
Down to business. I recently received an assignment in my instrumental music course to arrange a piece of music for a band. My options:
- Do it by hand. 19 different instruments? I think not.
- PAY for some software, and have to run it on my Windows pc
- Opensource alternative
Any guesses?
If you chose 2, you're wrong but if you chose 3, you are correct! It is true, even music notation software has an opensource alternative, and that is MuseScore. I will be giving my impressions on MuseScore in my next blog post but right now I will provide you with a little background on this piece of software.
MuseScore began it's life as MuseE, a MIDI/Audio sequencer which is still in existence. As MuseE grew, a decision was made to strip it of it's notation capabilities and create a designated scorewriter. This happened in 2002. in only 6 years MuseScore had achieved a yearly average of 180000 downloads! In 2008 their website, MuseScore.org, was launched. This new online presence on the web contributed to the feeding frenzy. The newest stable version (0.9.5) was released in 2009. The Beta (0.9.6), is already ready for download, and is included in the Lucid Ubuntu repositories under mscore.
Stay tuned for my impressions of MuseScore in the next blogpost.
-The Thoth-
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