MuseScore Studio 4.7 was released today, and it’s a notable one for anyone who’s been waiting on engraving fixes, guitar notation features, or a faster way to move through the editor.

One thing worth knowing up front: 4.7 leaned heavily on community contributions. Per Product Owner Bradley Kunda, the team reviewed more than 200 suggestions from open-source contributors for this release. Several of the headline features come directly from that work.

Bradley’s full walkthrough is in the video below. The rest of this post hits the highlights.

New Engraving Tools in 4.7

Lines with arrowheads are new in the Lines palette, useful for marking transitions like tempo, vowel sounds, or playing position. You can also add arrowheads to existing tempo, system, and stave text lines from the Properties panel.

Vertical brackets are in both the Lines and Keyboard palettes. Pianists can use them to mark left or right hand passages; guitarists can mark barré positions.

Parentheses got smarter too. Select a full chord and a single set of parens wraps the whole thing instead of every individual notehead. Select one note inside that parenthesized chord and toggle, and the parens split into separate groups.

Smaller wins: system dividers picked up scale and horizontal alignment controls in Styles, and quotation marks default to curly (you can undo back to straight if you really want them).

New Guitar Notation Tools

The big addition for guitarists is dive lines for whammy and vibrato bar use. They work like bends already do: add them to a note or tab fret number from the Guitar palette, then adjust pitch in quarter-tone intervals from the Properties panel. Pre-dives, dips, and scoops are in the same palette.

The capo feature picked up three new options:

  • Notation can show sounding pitches, useful for non-guitarist collaborators who need to see what’s actually being played
  • You can turn off transposition entirely, helpful when the capo’s only there to simplify fingering
  • Chord symbols can now be transposed alongside their fretboard diagrams

New Workflow Upgrades in 4.7

Selecting chords is faster: double click any note in a chord to select all of its notes. The R shortcut, previously input-only, now copies and pastes when you’ve got a note or chord selected, courtesy of community contributor Ashraf El Droubi.

The mixer’s sound selector and audio effects menus now have search boxes, a big deal if you’ve ever scrolled through a long chain looking for a specific plugin. Shift+Space starts playback from the last selected note or rest.

Q and W now halve or double the durations of selected notes (previously they only worked during input), thanks to Joachim Schmitz. Control+F (or Command+F) opens the Find/Go to panel and now selects a range of measures, thanks to Maxi Schindler.

New under Publish: score-to-video export. Choose Publish > Export > MP4 video to render a scrolling view of the score with audio playback. The MuseScore Studio handbook covers what you’ll need (a free copy of FFmpeg).

Audio Engine and Playback Tune-up

The audio engine got significant changes under the hood to reduce lag and improve performance across operating systems. Windows users benefit the most: the default buffer size dropped to 256 samples, and ASIO support is in, giving much lower latency for anyone with an ASIO-compatible audio interface.

The default MS Basic SoundFont sounds noticeably better thanks to contributor Bakajikara, who added back a low pass filter and enabled 16-bit and 24-bit options when exporting to WAV.

A few more contributor wins:

  • The Tuning and Temperaments plugin was rebuilt into a single interface by Xiao Migros, Ashraf El Droubi, and Fernando Martin (combining three older plugins into one)
  • Nathan Reed added “Respell Pitches with Sharps” and “Respell Pitches with Flats” in the Tools menu (both shortcut-assignable), plus MIDI accidental input that spells notes based on the accidental you’ve selected
  • Reed also added an auto-invert option that kicks in whenever the app is in dark mode

4.7 also includes stability fixes affecting app startup and multi-display setups.

How to Get MuseScore Studio 4.7

Existing Version 4 users will get an in-app update notification within the next few days. If you don’t want to wait:

  • Windows and macOS: open MuseHub, search for MuseScore Studio, and click Get or Update
  • Linux: download the latest version free from musescore.org

The full handbook is at handbook.musescore.org. If you want to pair MuseScore Studio with more realistic playback, MuseSounds libraries are on MuseHub. For ongoing release news, follow the MuseScore.org forum.