Helping

Want to help us out with MusE? Great! You don't have to be a C++ guru and you don't need to spend lots of time. A big portion of the help we need is feedback and reporting bugs.

Donate

If you like MusE and would like to show your appreciation for all time spent improving it by supporting the project. Tim's donation page is here.

Develop

MusE is programmed in C++ using the Qt5 toolkit, currently it is running on Linux. There are always zillions of ideas for enhancements floating around. Do you have your own ideas or just want to try your hand at enhancing MusE, do contact us on the forum.

Document

There is documentation here on the site that unfortunately is more incomplete than finished. Suggestions for work ideas here is to pick a dialog that isn't documented and describe each function in it, with screenshots, and add it to the wiki (contact us for access).

If you would like to write some articles, help to maintain the homepage or if you have got some artistic skills and would like to create new images feel free to do so. Do contact us before hand if you are planning to make a major effort, mainly to limit double effort or possible other plans.

Creating Instrument Definition Files (IDF)

Instrument definition files are best created by people that own the hardware in question. If you do create IDF files for some specific midi hardware, do send us the result. There is documentation in the distribution about how to create IDF files.

Report bugs

Before submitting a bug report, search the bug tracker to make sure your bug hasn't already been reported. If it has, then feel free to add any extra details you want to be there. Before submitting a new bug, think about that you should give use as much information as you can.

  • Kernel version
  • MusE version
  • jackd version
  • anything you think could be important

    • If your problem is a repeatable crash, it is very good if you could create a crash dump and/or a backtrace of where the problem occurs. For this to work best you need to have a MusE build with debug enabled.

    The process of building MusE with debug differs from the usual build instructions as follows:

  • 1. Run cmake with the added parameter -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug also -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<some other location>, e.g. $HOME/muse_debug is useful to place the installation in a separate location, leaving your ordinary installation untouched. Easiest way to do this is to edit the compile_muse.sh script.
  • 2. If you previously built MusE in this build dir remember to run 'make clean'. NOTE: Recent compile_muse.sh does this automatically.
  • 3. Now run 'make' and 'make install'
  • 4. Start muse with 'gdb <path to the installed muse binary>', e.g $HOME/muse_debug/bin/muse3 if you built it with the prefix suggested above.
  • 5. Type 'run' at the gdb prompt. MusE should now start. The debugger may stop MusE during start up a few times. If the MusE GUI does not show up and you get back the (gdb) prompt in the terminal, type 'continue' and press enter and the startup should proceed. Repeat this until MusE has fully started, it should get there eventually.
  • 6. Do the procedure in MusE that causes it to crash.
  • 7. The gdb console will have stopped the binary at the crash point, type 'bt full' to print a full backtrace leading up to the problem.
  • 8. Paste all this, including original error printed automatically by gdb, in the bug report.

    • Translate

    We are always seaching for developers who can help us to translate the MusE interface. The handy thing is that it is very easy to do that, you just need the linguist tool, MusE working, time and some cups of really good coffee or whatever you like!

    Look at Internationalisation, or at the README.translate file in the distribution for more details.

    Fix Bugs

    Is there some bug that really bothers you? If you have the know how and wish to learn the muse codebase, feel free to fix it as well. For questions about the inner workings contact us on the forum.

    Create music

    MusE is nothing without people using it and if you wish we can put links to your work as show cases on our home page. Plus, we really want to hear what people are able to create with MusE.