Musescore 3: Faster, easier to use, yet powerful and more customisable

Musescore has just announced the latest version of Musescore 3, which includes work by Martin Keary (formerly a designer at Microsoft and a classically trained composer), who joined the team as the Head of Design in November. He has been collaborating with the community and internal team on a design plan to make Musescore faster and more intuitive. This release is the first step towards that goal.

Musescore 3 features refinements that aim to improve first-time experience without disrupting the workflow of existing users. The most notable of these improvements is the new 'Palettes' menu, which allows users to edit and rearrange individual palettes as well as hundreds of individual elements. This allows users greater freedom to determine their own workflow. Another goal of the company is to make small ‘under the hood’ UX improvements to existing features with each release. In Musescore 3, the system for inputting notes and applying accidentals has been made more flexible, which should remove some friction for new users as well as those migrating from other programs.

There have also been multiple improvements to accessibility in Musescore 3, thanks to the work of our community contributors, Peter Jonas and Marc Sabatella. The Palettes panel has been made accessible to keyboard control and navigation has been made easier too. Accessibility has also been optimized in the Score View, where screen readers are now able to describe more elements than before. This will vastly improve the experience for users who are blind or visually impaired.

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

Musescore is now planning to build a comprehensive understanding of its audience by collecting more information on how the software is being used while increasing its commitment to 1:1 user-testing. By doing this, the company aims to target its redesign efforts on the most underperforming aspects of the application.

Speaking on the intricacies of design planning, Martin Keary said "We are acutely aware that our future plans have the ability to disrupt the experience of those who spent time learning how Musescore currently works. Balancing design changes against potential disruption is one of the trickiest aspects of managing an app of Musescore’s complexity. To help with this, we will be releasing design videos as well as beta versions for users to digest, which we hope will minimize disruption and encourage feedback. We don’t believe in the 'massive overhaul' approach. We are much more interested in making gradual improvements and being as transparent and collaborative as possible.»

ABOUT

Musescore is powered by an open source community and has more than 200,000 downloads per month. Over 20,000 unique scores are uploaded to musescore.com by professional and amateur composers per month, making it the biggest online catalog of publicly available scores. The audience of Musescore grows by 30% each year.

Musescore
Octaaf Soudanstraat 22
9051 Sint-Denijs-Westrem
Gent
Belgium

Press contact: Mikhail Kirilin m.kirilin@musescore.com

Musescore is a company devoted to helping aspiring musicians in their journey to master the music they love. Musescore offers free, powerful, and easy-to-use music notation software to create high-quality sheet music, with audio score playback for results that look and sound beautiful. Musescore has also formed an online community where musicians can share their creations, privately or publicly, through downloads, embeddable widgets, or Musescore's mobile apps, while also bringing additional social features to sheet music. The Musescore software is released under an open source license, and there is an open API for third party developers on Musescore.com.

This release was published on openPR.