Musette Free Music/Song Editor for Windows®

The Executive Summary

I really appreciate your help testing these experimental versions. I won't post program updates with known problems unless I specifically need help tracking down that specific problem. With each new program, there will usually be a list of new features or changes that need testing. These test versions have all features enabled, along with some additional features to assist with testing and debugging. Planned major changes and enhancements include improved beams, improved midi import, reformatting an entire score and undo. These will be added gradually and tested individually.

The posted files self-extracting zip files, like MusUnzip.exe. Each zip file contains everything you will need. It doesn't require any special installation or rebooting. Just unzip to the folder of your choice. You should keep these experimental versions separate from your regular working version.

Besides getting your problem reports, I'd also appreciate you posting some of your music files so I know what's getting tested.

The Fine Print

Files saved with experimental versions of Musette may not load reliably in older versions. Save often, and if you're working on something important that you don't want to trust to the experimental version, consider using the current release instead. On rare occasions, it becomes clear that fixing a serious problem requires a whole new approach and extensive changes that could make files saved with one version unusable in the next release. I try to maintain compatibility with all older files, but there's a very small chance that it might not be practical in some cases.

The most difficult part of fixing problems is often recreating them. In some cases, people may discover a problem but not remember exactly what they did. In such cases, post what you remember and perhaps others can experiment and try to recreate the problem. These test programs have some special debugging features including creating a log file of mouse clicks, key presses and menu selections within Musette. The log file, called "MusetteLog_yy_mm_dd.txt" (yy_mm_dd will be the current date) is part of Musette, stops when Musette stops, and doesn't track anything outside of Musette. You can read the log files with a text editor such as Wordpad to see what's there, and delete them at any time. If you find a problem, having the log file and your music file can help others recreate the problem by showing us what you did.

If something strange happens, immediately use "File/Export/ASCII" which creates a text file of your music file and some additional information about the inner workings of Musette, but doesn't include any personal information or specifics about your computer. When saving, use the music filename with a file extension of ".txt". For instance, if your Musette file is "BigNoise.mus", name the text file "BigNoise.txt". You can read these files with a text editor such as Wordpad to see what's there. Post the text file, along with the corresponding Musette file (*.mus) and the debug log file ("MusetteLog_yy_mm_dd.txt").

These experimental versions of Musette are fully functional, but the Consort Edition features expire in 45 days unless you enter your authorization code. The 45 days starts when I create the new version which is the date shown in "Help/About" after the version number. Each new version posted will work for another 45 days. After the 45 days, it still works without the Consort Edition features and you can still open, play and print all your files, and edit within the abilities of the Solo Edition.