Filed under: Audio, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Open Source, Beta

If you've ever ventured into the world of music notation, you'll know that to produce musical scores there's normally a large amount of expense involved to pick up the relevant application (either Sibelius - my favoured application - or Finale).That's not an ideal situation if you're short of the (hundreds of) dollars required to grab a licence, and whilst the developers of Sibelius and Finale both offer reduced-priced, lesser-featured versions of their applications, wouldn't it be great if the open source community were able to lend a hand much as GIMP has for people unable to afford Photoshop

That's where Musescore fits in. An open-source notation app, it offers all the features you need such as transposition, part extraction and much more - for the super-awesome price of free! Throw in the reading and saving of MusicXML documents which enable you to move scores between any of the major notation apps, and MuseScore - when it eventually finds its way to 1.0 - looks as though it'll be absolutely ideal for anyone looking to notate their next hit song, or write for a symphony orchestra near you.

Right now, an early version of Musescore (0.9.4) is only available for Windows and Linux, though work on a Mac version is in development.

MuseScore: the Free and Open Source Music Notation Application originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.