From Silence to Score
Chapter 1 · Setting Up

Installing MuseScore 4

First launch, the workspace tour, and naming the parts of the window you will live in for the rest of the book.

Every other chapter in this book teaches an idea about music. This one teaches a program. That is a fair trade to make once, at the start, because from Chapter 5 onward the software has to be invisible — a pane of glass between your idea and the page — and glass is only invisible when you have stopped noticing it. So we spend Part 0 noticing it: installing MuseScore, learning where everything lives, getting a note onto a staff and a sound out of the speakers. Four short chapters, and then the tool steps out of the way for good.

1.1Getting MuseScore

MuseScore 4 is free — genuinely free, not a trial — and open source. Download it from musescore.org; the site detects your operating system and offers the right build.

One naming note that trips people up: as of version 4.4 the application is branded MuseScore Studio, while the project and the file format are still called MuseScore. When this book says “MuseScore” it means the program in front of you, whatever the splash screen calls it this month. Everything here is written against MuseScore 4; if you are on the old MuseScore 3, some menus and shortcuts will differ, and it is worth upgrading before you go further.

1.2First launch: the Home screen

Open MuseScore and you land not in a score but on the Home screen — a launcher, not a workspace.

Figure 1.1
Figure 1.1 The Home screen on first launch. The left rail switches between Scores, Plugins, MuseSounds, and Learn; the main panel lists recent work. On a fresh install it holds a single tile — New score — which is where a blank piece begins.

The left rail is a set of top-level destinations. Scores is the one you will use constantly: it lists everything you have opened recently and offers the New score tile that starts the setup wizard. MuseSounds manages the high-quality instrument sounds you can download for playback; Plugins and Learn you can ignore for now. Along the very top sit three tabs — Home, Score, and Publish. Home is where you are; Score is the editor, and it appears the moment you open or create a piece; Publish handles uploading to the musescore.com website, which is not something this book does.

You could click New score now and walk through the wizard, but instead let us open a piece that already exists, so the whole editor appears at once with something in it.

1.3The workspace

Open any score — for the tour, the demo file that ships with this book’s materials, A Little Tune — and the window fills in. This is where you will spend the rest of the book, so it is worth learning the name of every region before we use any of them.

Figure 1.2
Figure 1.2 The MuseScore editing window with a score open. Learn these regions by name — the menu bar and toolbars across the top, the panel docked at the left, the score itself in the center, and the status bar along the bottom. Everything in this book happens in one of these places.

Reading Figure 1.2 from top to bottom:

Two small settings, set once, will make the rest of the book match what you see on these pages. Open Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Appearance (on macOS, MuseScore Studio ▸ Preferences) and, if you like, set the theme to Light — every screenshot in this book uses it. And in View ▸ Show, confirm the Status bar is ticked. Neither changes how MuseScore works; both change how well this book’s pictures line up with your screen.

That is the whole geography. You now know the name of every place a command can hide. In the next chapter we put the center panel to use and get our first notes onto the staff.