lmms VS MuseScore

Compare lmms vs MuseScore and see what are their differences.

lmms

Cross-platform music production software (by LMMS)

MuseScore

MuseScore is an open source and free music notation software. For support, contribution, bug reports, visit MuseScore.org. Fork and make pull requests! (by musescore)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
lmms MuseScore
206 146
7,486 11,364
2.1% 2.0%
9.3 10.0
4 days ago 4 days ago
C++ C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 only GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

lmms

Posts with mentions or reviews of lmms. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-26.
  • Studio One 6.5 is now available as public beta version for Ubuntu Linux
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2023
  • If you're interested in eye-tracking, I'm interested in funding you
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Aug 2023
    # Topic 2: Dasher + Guitar Hero style music theory/improvisation practice program

    Back "on topic": I remember being quite enamoured/fascinated by dasher when I first encountered it. It's quite a unique interaction paradigm with the constant "forward movement" and "intelligent" pre-filtering/constraint of options with size-based prioritization.

    Your suggestion to extend this interaction style for use in the music theory domain immediately appealed to me, as it intersects with some musical things I've been thinking about/playing with recently.

    Over the past couple of years I've been playing around with ("rules based" rather than ML) procedural music generation primarily in the context of games.

    This has been motivated by a couple of things: partly a procgen project is helpful as a driver for gaining an deeper understanding of music theory which I would like to develop for my own composition/production; and, I'm really interested in exploring ways of providing people with the experience of actually composing/creating their own music--which is something I think many people perceive as something only "musicians"/"composers" can do.

    The latter is driven my own music composition/creation/education experience: I learned piano as a kid for about a year until it was "mutually agreed" that if I wasn't going to practice perhaps it would be best to stop. :D But I've always really enjoyed music, particularly electronic/dance/EDM, and wanted to also create it & not just consume it--over the years I played around a tiny amount with creating some but gravitated toward DJing as my primary means of musical expression.

    Then a few years ago I started "more seriously" creating tracks with LMMS (a FLOSS DAW https://lmms.io) and while progress was slow it was still nice to be able to enjoy the results.

    But I grew frustrated/dissatisfied by the fact that I didn't really know how to add more of a melodic component to my music. (I'm an Anthemic Trance guy from way back. :D )

    Over a couple of years after butting my head up against Music Theory a few times and bouncing off again (not unlike my experience with Rust :D ) one day I suddenly somehow "saw" some of the (simplified) Music Theory patterns/rules that I'd not internalised/understood previously.

    And then I could add melody to my tracks! :o I mean they weren't masterpieces but it sounded like music! It blew my mind. :)

    Not long after I realised something I found quite profound: it felt like music, instrument skills & music theory had only ever been presented to me as a thing that you did so you could play other people's music but I never wanted to play other people's music, I wanted to create my own!

    Which then triggered a period of "Why didn't anyone teach me years ago when I was a kid that you could create your own music by starting with a few simple rules & building on them? Here I was "many" years later voluntarily learning about music theory, trying to apply it and even practising scales! :o

    Anyway, that experience made me wonder if other people have experienced music & its creation in the same way and what opportunities there might be (particularly within a game/casual context) to provide those people with their first taste of creating music through a "guided" experience of just playing (in both senses of the word).

    So, yeah, the "Guitar Dasher"/"Piano Dasher" concept aligns quite nicely with that. :)

    Not that anyone asked me. :D

    Couple of related things:

    * Your suggestion also reminded me of another FLOSS DAW I played around with called Helio which has a "chord tool" (https://docs.helio.fm/tips-and-tricks.html#chord-tool) which appears as a pie-menu pre-populated with chords that fit with the current scale/root. I seem to recall that there are commercial DAWs that also have a similar UI.

    * While I'm not particularly happy with its current state (really need to upload the most recent version of the code, which I'm fractionally happier with) here's my first foray into music procgen for a game jam entry (with a "debug quality UI" for controlling the output), if you're interested in checking it out: https://rancidbacon.itch.io/the-conductor

    * And from a different angle here's another game jam entry where the concept I was playing with was essentially using music theory concepts as the basis for creating combat interactions/patterns (e.g. "Oh, no, how am I going to harmonize with whatever that was that the boss just played?!") and it all takes place on the "Grand Staff"/"Great Stave": https://rancidbacon.itch.io/stave-off

    (Unfortunately as often seems to be the case I ended up spending more time fighting with a Unicode music engraving font/standard than I did writing game play for that last one. :) )

  • Linux for Video Editing and Photo Editing and Music DJ: Some idea?
    5 projects | /r/linux4noobs | 4 Jun 2023
    For music making, it kind of depends on what you use normally but LMMS is a decent free DAW.
  • My dual boot with windows 11 won't boot past intro screen or even into bios after failed attempt to fix frequent Kerbal panic.
    2 projects | /r/debian | 27 May 2023
    Give a try to Ardour, LMMS, MusE and Rosegarden.
  • Resources and such
    2 projects | /r/LinuxArtists | 29 Apr 2023
    LMMS
  • Looking for projects to contribute to
    16 projects | /r/cpp | 25 Apr 2023
    LMMS can always use some volunteer time. 🙂 https://github.com/lmms/lmms
  • Looking for some editing software
    2 projects | /r/software | 17 Apr 2023
    Take a look at: Shotcut for video. Paint.NET for image editing. LMMS for your soundtrack. All free.
  • How can i set up a DAW and use a piano Vst on linux?
    2 projects | /r/linuxaudio | 16 Apr 2023
    Consider giving LMMS a try! It has support for VSTs and soundfonts and you can connect your MIDI keyboard
  • FreeBSD Home Audio Studio
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2023
    I am not really qualified to access it's quality, but there is also lmms, which looks like it works well enough.

    https://lmms.io/

    Not really qualified because I am not a musician and I was only using lmms to play around with a midi dials and buttons box, openbsd's sndio. and to see if I could get them to work togther. So in my case it was more of a systems integration exercise than making any music with it.

  • Good and reliable tool
    10 projects | /r/Piracy | 31 Jan 2023
    Bruh, use LMMS. https://lmms.io/

MuseScore

Posts with mentions or reviews of MuseScore. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-04-30.
  • How do you use a chromebook?
    2 projects | /r/chromeos | 30 Apr 2023
    Not that I need to prove anything, but for anyone curious, here's a composition I created using the music notation software I help develop and support on my Chromebook. If you hit the play button on the composition, you'll hear the multitrack recording I created on my Chromebook as well, with my students singing the various parts. The piece was created for my online course teaching counterpoint, developed completely on my Chromebook. Here is a video from my most recent - the video is done from the Chromebook and the software managing the multicamera layout and screen share is software I developed on my Chromebook. And here is the online community I manage from my Chromebook.
  • Crash when attempting to place a note in place of, or simply select, a particular rest.
    2 projects | /r/Musescore | 19 Apr 2023
    Sorry to hear you're having trouble! Definitely, we'd need the MSCZ file to be able to investigate. Normally we ask that people first post to the official Support forum on musescore.org to get confirmation before opening an issue on GitHub to report a bug formally, but it sounds like you've got things pretty well figured out in terms of having precise steps to reproduce the crash reliably, so I would encourage you to just go straight to the issue tracker on GitHub - https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues
  • My Chromebook can't open MuseScore anymore since the last update
    2 projects | /r/Musescore | 19 Apr 2023
    If you installed some way other by downloading the AppImage from musescore.org and running it with the "install" option, you should remove whatever version you have now - third party builds are often problematic - and get the official version.
    2 projects | /r/Musescore | 19 Apr 2023
    I install it trought commands and not from musescore.org because I have a 32 bits Chromebook. So I don't know what to do. The problem is that I can remove it. It doesn't show me the "delete" button. Even trought Terminal.
  • MuseScore deployment in JAMF on MacOS
    3 projects | /r/jamf | 2 Feb 2023
    Follow the GitHub directions and you can find the link needed to build the label as: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/releases/download/v4.0.1/MuseScore-4.0.1.230121751.dmg
  • How come Musescore 4 isn’t a GPL violation, and is their mixed-proprietary model a long-term threat to other GPL software?
    3 projects | /r/opensource | 21 Jan 2023
    According to this thread, MuseSounds isn’t even a separate process, but it’s loaded dynamically. That settles the shared-memory discussion since they operate as one program in a shared address space.
    3 projects | /r/opensource | 21 Jan 2023
    I looked into the source, and from my perspective it looks like the only purpose of the dll API (it's inside libhandler.h) is to avoid releasing the source. There is only ONE implementation, the dll is ONLY used by Muse Score, and there is also no documentation on this API... The lib, MuseSamplerCoreLib.dll, is installed to Windows/System32. The sample format is proprietary I guess, but internally uses the open source opus codec (so sample data can be extracted by just using opusdec.exe from opus-codec.org) Here is some feedback from the team on the issue: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/15706 https://musescore.org/en/node/340466
    3 projects | /r/opensource | 21 Jan 2023
    Under the GPL they don't owe you specifications. Under the GPL they don't owe you documentation. Under the GPL they don't owe you a build how-to or integration instructions. Per the GPL, all they owe you is the code, and that's here. If the interface you are talking about is in that repo, then they've met their obligation. The GPL doesn't say they have to make it easy to use their interface or explain what it does, it says they owe you the code that implements it.
  • Show HN: PipeScore – FOSS Bagpipe Notation Software
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2023
    I've been working on some version of this since May 2019. It is a web app that allows writing out music for the Highland bagpipe.

    While it uses the same notation as normal music, bagpipe music tends to have a greater focus on gracenotes (embellishments). Most music software does not deal with this very well (e.g. MuseScore just displays a list of every single possible embellishment, of which there are hundreds [1]). PipeScore instead takes advantage of the fact that the form of many embellishments is dependent on the notes adjacent to it, allowing it to reduce the number of options down to just 13.

    [1] https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/blob/2b428c00c9df65c3...

  • Making the ultimate-guitar.com web player easier to practice with
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jan 2023
    musecore is opensource and supports tab playing and editing alongside notation: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore

What are some alternatives?

When comparing lmms and MuseScore you can also consider the following projects:

muse - MusE is a digital audio workstation with support for both Audio and MIDI

ardour - Mirror of Ardour Source Code

LibreScore - The open source (GPLv3), serverless (IPFS-based), offline-first, and totally free alternative to musescore.com

ebsynth - Fast Example-based Image Synthesis and Style Transfer

helm - Helm - a free polyphonic synth with lots of modulation

alda - A music programming language for musicians. :notes:

overtone - Collaborative Programmable Music

react-native-windows - A framework for building native Windows apps with React.

seq66 - Seq66: Seq24-based live MIDI looper/editor. v. 0.99.12 2024-01-13. NSM support; Linux/Windows/FreeBSD; PDF user manual. Help access to tutorial and PDF. Beta code in portfix branch.

Tenacity - Tenacity is an easy-to-use, privacy-friendly, FLOSS, cross-platform multi-track audio editor/recorder for Windows, macOS, Linux and other operating systems. Project currently on an indefinite hiatus.

VeeSeeVSTRack - Open-source virtual modular synthesizer