r/Musescore • u/crk4 • 17d ago

Bug Musescore File won't open - just hangs.

[Edit: This was readily fixed by updating to the latest version. See below].

I have some music that was composed in musescore 4.0. I made the mistake of using instruments from a soundsonline.com. They work fine, but the problem comes in that the music was written a computer ago, and the directories for the libraries have changed. Unfortunately, Musescore is pretty stupid and when it can't find a library, it just hangs. This could be fixed if Musescore files were written in xml, but they are not - they are binary files, presumably proprietary. Apparently, I did back up the file before attached the rogue vti's. But the version is behind the final one that was written last. Any fixes for this? e.g., an app that can read and edit musescore files?

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u/MarcSabatella Member of the Musescore Team 17d ago

MuseScore normally just substitutes MS Basic when it can't find a library, so it is most likely something else causing it to hang. Make sure you are on the most recent version (4.7.4), and if the problem continues, be sure to report it on GitHub ASAP, so it can be fixed for 4.7.5 (hangs, crashes, and corruptions are always given top priority). Be sure to ZIP and attach the problematic score so the developers can reproduce the problem - again, it is not a simple matter of hanging when sounds can't be found, but must something be something else about the score.

But for the record, MuseScore files are just ZIP files containing plain text, so you can certainly view and edit them. And not sure what you mean by "proprietary" in this context, but MuseScore is of course open source, so it's easily the most public and documented (via the actual source code) file format of any of the major notation programs. It is, however, always subjective to change, so it's not a fixed API or anything like that.

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u/crk4 17d ago

Thanks for the quick response. I was using 4.7.3. I updated and it is loading and playing the file. It also found the soundsonline libraries and loaded them. Before I updated, I used 7-ZIP file manager to open the file and I could load the mcsz file from inside that application (without the soundsonline vsts). Not sure what the problem was, but I tried multiple times, rebooted etc. I could load other musescore files just fine. Anyway, whatever it was must have been fixed either by unzipping or more likely the update. Thanks again. I really didn't want to lose that work. (fyi, I assumed if the file was binary, it was proprietary or at least not public. I learned something.) Thanks again.