MC Musiceditor - Home

MC Musiceditor is free/open source (GPLv2 or above) music notation software. MC Musiceditor is made for Windows (XP and above). In addition, MCMusiceditor (8.5.7 and above) runs also fine on Linux under Wine. MC Musiceditor is developed by Reinier Maliepaard, psychologist, software engineer, musician and retired educator (music theory, music history and composition).

MC Musiceditor is still maintained, although the release cycle is slow. Why? I used MC Musiceditor for writing a book on music theory without noticing any problems (preview chapter 1 and chapter 36). New releases will have only minor improvements. Thanks for using MC Musiceditor!

The latest release, MC Musiceditor 9.0.0 (31 december 2023), has a new Menu structure. The most basic commands are presented under Menu Rhythm, Melody and Harmony. It is meant as a learning path for you. Before going to Menu Advanced, all topics from the learning path should be clear to you! In addition, we made a (Sub)Menu search tool, which replaces the online and offline user guide. The menu item MCM examples contains many examples in several categories.

MC Musiceditor uses a modification of the ABC-language which was invented by Chris Walshaw. The ABC language is simple to use and can create music scores from basic melodies to a complex symphony score. Our modification of the ABC-language makes it, in our opinion, all easier (why? study item 9 of the tutorial section).

For the convenience of ABC-users, MC Musiceditor 6.0.9 and above is a hybrid version: you can use the MC Musiceditor for MCM-code (default) and ABC-code! The trigger is L:mcm_default. If found, the code will be interpreted as MCM. If the L: value doesn't equal to 'mcm_default', the code will be interpreted as ABC.

Musical notation data of MC Musiceditor can be shared and interchanged with WYSIWYG music notation editors like MuseScore, Finale and Sibelius (to mention only the most popular programs by music students).

Basic features

• Note entry by mouse clicks, keyboard short cuts or just typing
• Chord entry by mouse clicks
• Score previewer and midiplayer
• Export to Midi
• Export to PDF; the sheet music (PDF) is of a high quality (Example: Magnificat (2004) of Reinier Maliepaard)
• Pitch manipulations (transpose, pitch converter)
• Format functions (score, midi)
• File functions (rename, merge)
• Templates and score examples

Look at the menitem Screenshots to get a further idea.

3 more reasons to use MC Musiceditor

• The scriptbased editor enables you to manipulate data with a great ease, e.g. using a text editor like Notepad++
• The software is donateware, so free to use and free of charge. But users are encouraged to make a small monetary donation: see the donate buttons left.
• You can make webapplications easily. We made an example html page: click here. You can also download a zip file: unpack and run the index.html offline in your browser: click here. Tip: visit our webgames: www.bestmusicteacher.com (section music theory)