#UPDATE MUSESCORE FOR FREE#

The site has to pay for the right to distribute that score-in many cases, based on the number of downloads made.īypassing those controls leaves Muse Group on the hook either for costs it has no way to monetize (e.g., by ads for free users) or for violating its own distribution agreements with rightsholders (by failing to properly track downloads).

#UPDATE MUSESCORE DOWNLOAD#

Advertisementįurther, those downloads can often cost the distributor real money-a free download of a score licensed to Muse Group by a commercial rightsholder (e.g., Disney) is generally not 'free' to Muse Group itself. Those agreements do not give users carte blanche to bypass controls imposed on those downloads. The distribution agreement between Muse Group and the rightsholder allows legitimate downloads, but only when using the site or app as intended. Just because you can access the score via the app or website doesn't mean you're free to access it anywhere, anyhow, or redistribute that score yourself. But many of the scores are only available by arrangement between the score owner and Muse Group itself-and this has several important implications.

#UPDATE MUSESCORE PRO#

Musescore-downloader describes itself succinctly: 'download sheet music from for free, no login or MuseScore Pro required.' Musescore-dataset is nearly as straightforward: it declares itself 'the unofficial dataset of all music sheets and users on .' In simpler terms: musescore-downloader lets you download things from that you shouldn't be able to musescore-dataset is those files themselves, already downloaded.įor scores that are in the public domain or that users have uploaded under Creative Commons licenses, this isn't necessarily a problem. Those repositories are musescore-downloader (created November 2019) and musescore-dataset (created March 2020). Muse Group's beef with Xmader comes from two other repositories, created specifically to bypass subscription fees. Xmader is also currently 21,710 commits behind the original MuseScore project repository. Xmader forked MuseScore in November 2020 and appears to have abandoned that fork entirely it only has six commits total-all trivial, and all made the same week that the fork was created. While Xmader did, in fact, fork MuseScore, that's not the root of the controversy. It also claims more than 1,000 new scores are uploaded to the service each day. In the case of commercial all-rights-reserved scores, Muse Group is not generally the rightsholder for the copyrighted work-Muse Group is an intermediary that has secured the rights to distribute that work via the MuseScore app.Īccording to Muse Group, MuseScore is the most popular application of its kind-it claims more than 200,000 musicians find scores on it every day from a repository of more than 1,000,000 publicly available scores. The application itself is GPLv3, but the musical works it enables access to via have a wide variety of licenses, including public domain, Creative Commons, and fully commercial. It's important to note that the application itself and the sheet music to which it provides access are not the same thing, and they are not provided under the same license.

The MuseScore application provides access to sheet music, including legitimate access to sheet music copyrighted and owned by large groups such as Disney. What’s MuseScore?īefore we can talk about how Muse Group got itself in trouble, we have to talk about what the MuseScore app itself is-and is not. One such developer, Wenzheng Tang (' Xmader' on GitHub) went considerably further than modifying the app-he also created separate apps designed to bypass MuseScore Pro subscription fees.Īfter thoroughly reviewing the public comments made by both sides at GitHub, Ars spoke at length with Muse Group Head of Strategy Daniel Ray-known on GitHub by the moniker 'workedintheory'-to get to the bottom of the controversy. The MuseScore app itself is licensed GPLv3, which gives developers the right to fork its source and modify it. This time, the controversy isn't over Audacity-it's about MuseScore, an open source application that allows musicians to create, share, and download musical scores (especially, but not only, in the form of sheet music). Further Reading No, open source Audacity audio editor is not “spyware”Muse Group-owner of the popular audio-editing app Audacity-is in hot water with the open source community again.

Update musescore