Canorus description
Canorus is the next generation music score editor

Canorus can be easily called the sequel of NoteEdit, which is a well-known KDE music score editor. NoteEdit was the child of one man, Dr. Jörg Anders from university in Chemnitz, Germany.

Mr. Anders put a great effort into the project and NoteEdit is still one of the most usable music score editors available for Linux. NoteEdit was still maintained and some interesting new features were introduced (GCC4.x compatibility, direct printing support using various engravers, many GUI improvements and new translations).

After many of hours spent planning (a move to Qt4 was inevitable) and bughunting, several problems became apparent. Most notably, NoteEdit had a poorly-designed base, a strong KDE3 dependency, used the TSE3 MIDI library (which worked flawlessly only on Linux), and suffered from a lack of developer documentation.

A rewrite was needed, but rather than rewrite a program originally written for the KDE environment only, NoteEdit developers decided to create a new project based on object-oriented programming and Qt4 from the beginning with portability and openess in mind. Canorus was born.

Canorus is a Latin word meaning sweet, rich, deep, warm, friendly, and full of gentle sound and harmony. This is exactly what Canorus should present: A friendly user interface, deep and strong fundamentals, a warm welcome to newcomers and a rich set of features.

Canorus vision

Canorus should introduce breakthrough features for a music score editor application like a scripting language support, plugins subsystem (plugins written in Python and Ruby or natively compiled library) - similar to extensions in FireFox, open XML-based score file format, similar score structures to Lilypond in order to achieve better interoperability, source view of the score with a real-time parser, multiple viewports on the same music score and more (experimental features like 3D score view?)!

It should introduce a new way of music representation and a brand new user interface for a composer (unfortunately, most of the serious composers still use pencil&paper).

Why free?

Simply: Because we don't need another commercial-bloaty music score editor which dies in a few years and is not compatible with its competitors. Sounds familiar? Actually, things are a bit more complex :)

Canorus was started with openess in mind. We wanted to create a new interface to music composition. This was experimental and no one would pay us for just experimenting and searching around.