Yes, I'm talking about MuseScore and I'm just, I want to do a quick polling. Are there MuseScore users in the room? Whoa, is it? Oh, I didn't expect that. I thought it would be, no, actually.

I thought I would be addressing developers and recruiting developers, but actually users. That's just great. Okay. So, this is MuseScore. It's an open source music annotation program. This is what it looks like for people who are not aware. This is sheet music, so we can create this and then

you just start playing from it. That's it. Alright. Now, what is MuseScore? MuseScore is a program to write sheet music with and above all it's a busy week editor.

So, there are lots of other music notation programs out there, but this one is a true busy week, which makes it extremely simple to make sheet music with. Second, it's quite fast in order to add your notes. You can do it via the mouse, also keyboard, and as well with MIDI. So, in the latest

0.9.4 version, which was released two days ago, the MIDI import for Windows was being added to it. It used to be on Linux already, but now on Windows as well.

And we are also seeking for developers for extending the MIDI import functionality. Then, next, there is also an integrated sequencer in there. Also, very good import-export of music.xml as well as MIDI, of course. This needs extra work as well. But I'll come back to that later.

It's also platform-independent. It's written on Qt, which means we should be able to build it for Linux, Windows, and Macintosh with ease. But the Macintosh one right now is still giving us problems because of a font issue.

The other thing is it's been translated to 12 languages, which is really great. The last six languages have been added in just four or five months' time, so it's really getting a lot of adoption right now. And then, last but not least, it's a GPL license.

Now, a little bit of the history. It all started in 2002 by a certain person called Vladimir Shvir, and he's right here on Fozdan. He's sitting there, so if you want to speak with him later on, you can go ahead. He started this in 2002 as a spin-off of Muse, which is a MIDI sequencer.

Now, initially it was only for Linux, and the port was only available at the end of 2007. Also, by the end of 2007, the 0.9 release was being made, and since then it was

quite stable and quite usable just for end users who were just looking for a good notation program. So, by that time, we had around 50 downloads per day, which wasn't bad knowing that there was zero marketing around it. Then, in 2008, in September, we launched the musecore.org website,

which was quite a milestone because at that point, we just made a step from 50 downloads per day to 200 downloads per day. And that was quite a step forward, because lots of people were coming, or newcomers, new users, and

on the website, people were finding bugs and so on, and that speeded up the development cycle a lot, so that was really great. And then, just two days ago, the final version, 0.9.4, was being released, and we are right now at 600 downloads per day, which is really exciting,

but it should be much more, normally, in the future. So, this is what it looked like in 2008. As you can see, we had a tipping point there at the end of September, and normally, in 2009, we should be going over, let's say, 20, 30, even perhaps 40,000 downloads per month,

which would be really, really great. Now, what do people say right now about Musecore, about the current state? The top one is a teacher, Joseph Pisano, and as a teacher, he used to use Finalo, more specifically, Finalo Nopod,

which is the free version of it. It was a free version, because in September, the Finalo people decided to make the next release of Finalo Nopod, month-free, and people have to pay right now $10. Now, $10 is enough for just people who are looking for a sheet music program,

in order to look for an alternative. And just at that moment, Musecore was ready for, not prime time, but just for those users to accept them, and therefore, we were just at the right time, and he was really delighted when he found Musecore, and as you can read,

he will be promoting it to his students as well. Now, the second one, he was mainly looking at the quality output, and for lots of you, you will probably know Lillipont, which is also

a score typesetter program for Linux, as well as Windows and Mac, and Lillipont users are used to the high-quality outputs of Lillipont. Now, since Musecore uses the same font, and also some of the same basic principles of formatting the score,

Musecore looks great as well. The third one, he was looking for a program which was easy to use, and he was used to be a CBLIS user. CBLIS is the number one music notation program on the market,

and due to the easy handling of Musecore, he moved over to Musecore, which is great. Now, we do have some development challenges. First of all, the MIDI. I talked about it, so at the beginning, now the MIDI is

rather just a simple import. It doesn't know anything about real-time import, so it's like you import by using your keyboard, as well as, you still have to put in the time and so on, which makes it a little bit,

it's usable, but it can be enhanced a lot. So, if there are people here who are used to writing MIDI software or whatever, just contact Ravnish, because I'm not the MIDI guy, and just get in touch with him. Now, also the playback can be improved a lot. At this moment, lots of

musical data is not taken into account to play the score as it should, and another big important thing would be extra features for guitar players. So, fretboards and tap staffs can be supported as well. Of course, also some more help on the

music XML import and export. This is really important, because if you want to convert users from Finale or Sibilus towards Musecore, you have to be able to take your catalog or your sheet music collection with you as well, and therefore,

music XML input and output is really important. So, the conversion of their files from Sibilus or Finale can go as smooth as possible, and music XML right now is the standard for doing this. And then, last but not least, there is also

lots of talk on the mailing list coming on about more fonts. So, right now, Musecore uses the Feta font, also used by Ludipont, but it's the only font available. So, we are missing support for other fonts,

jazzfonts and so on. There are some fonts available, mainly copyrighted fonts, which means you can only use them for personal use. They cannot be distributed. So, we are looking for a font wizard here who knows how to make a jazz font or something similar.

So, if you are a dead wizard or you know someone, please contact me, because jazzfonts is really, really much requested by many users and might also, again, attract users from Sibilus and Finale towards Musecore. Now, the last thing which I added, it's not actually

connected to the development challenges, is more regarding marketing or promotion. Next week, I'm going to meet 40 students who are graphic students, or how do you call it, artwork designers, and they will

help Musecore to create a set of artwork starting with the logo and the house styling and icons within Musecore, the splash screen and so on. Also banners for promotional purposes and we would like to do this while fixing or while adding the new features and then

have it ready for Musecore 1.0. With this rebranding, we hope that Musecore will have a quite professional look and convince new users to start using Musecore. This rebranding effort will also be some kind of an open design

project, so if you are going to Musecore starting from, I mean, in two weeks or something, you will see posts concerning logos and house style and so on, and it's a purpose that the community is getting involved and getting votes, for instance, for all the

logo proposals, because there will be 40 students, so there will be lots of proposals, and it will be fun to figure out with you guys what would be the nicest logo for us when we release Musecore 1.0. Now, the top challenge right now still is the

release of the Macintosh version. We have a cute issue problem with the Feta font. I talked with Werner this afternoon and he has some idea on how to fix this. Normally, at this moment, as we see it, it's a cute problem, but we might circumvent it by

just pulling out the font out of the distribution, because right now it's baked in. We might pull it out and put it on the file system as an external font and that might just be the start of a solution for this. If you are a cute developer yourself and

you might be aware on how fonts work or whatever, you can also visit this URL and kick in, because right now the biggest asked feature is Musecore for Macintosh. Lots of people or

musicians worldwide use Macintosh or Apple, and therefore it's one of the biggest requested features, and we will probably be waiting for the Mac release before 1.0. The reason is quite simple. If we do mailing worldwide to all music schools and we are missing the

Macintosh version, then it's quite hard for people. Probably lots of people will just draw back and not get involved with Musecore. So this is our top challenge for the moment. Now if you want to follow Musecore, and lots of you do already, then there's the website.

There's also the Twitter channel. The Twitter channel, you can follow the daily developments if there are any, because the development group isn't that big. So it's updated every two days, three days, something like that. And it will tell you about new pre-releases on Windows and so on, so you can grab them and check it out yourself

and check for the bug fixes. Then also Delicious is being used a lot by us because we bookmark all the blocks and all the reviews we find on Musecore. So if you are looking for,

let's say, some information about Musecore, not only can you find it on the website itself, but also on the Delicious bookmark page, where you can find all kind of bookmarks for all kind of languages about blog posts where Musecore is being featured in. And then of course the Facebook group or page.

So connect with us, go to the website, just any problem you have, any crush you have, something else, try to define the steps. It's as easy as possible, so we can reproduce it and write a fix

real fast and then release another pre-release, so you can get a much more stable version of Musecore. That's it. Yeah, go ahead. No, I know about Jianpu, which is the Chinese numbered or ciphered music notation,

but this Hindi one, Indian one. Okay, okay. There's a question for Ramsh. He's coming over from Muse,

so he should be able to answer that after the talk, probably. Some other questions that I guess it will be over in 30 seconds.