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MuseScore

A free music notation and composition program.

MuseScore is a free music notation and composition program. It lets musicians and composers write, hear back via virtual instruments, and print sheet music. The notation engine renders to high-quality PDF and PNG and supports MusicXML import/export for interchange with other notation software.

MuseScore Limited maintains the software and runs the musescore.com community library, which hosts over a million user-uploaded scores; some features on the website are a paid subscription, but the desktop application itself is free under GPLv3. The MuseScore 4 release in 2022 was a substantial rewrite with significantly improved playback realism through the included Muse Sounds samples.

MuseScore is widely used by music students, choir directors, amateur composers, and educators preparing teaching materials. For professional engraving, Sibelius and Dorico still dominate in commercial publishing, but MuseScore covers the great majority of small-to-medium-scale notation needs.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install musescore3
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install musescore
Arch:          sudo pacman -S musescore
macOS:         brew install --cask musescore