Finale is gone. Your music isn't.
Rescore opens legacy pre-2014 Finale .mus files and exports clean MusicXML 4.0. No Finale required, no upload, your scores never leave your computer.
Free and open-source (MIT).
MakeMusic discontinued Finale in 2024 after ~35 years. The universal advice, "just open it in Finale and export MusicXML," stops working the moment Finale will no longer authorize. Composers, teachers, libraries, and archives are left with decades of .mus files and no path forward.
Other tools need Finale installed, or only handle the newer .musx files. Rescore reads the legacy pre-2014 .mus format directly and converts it to MusicXML 4.0, the open interchange format that MuseScore, Dorico, and Sibelius all import. Like reading an old .doc, this is format conversion: legacy .mus has no encryption and no DRM, only an undocumented layout.
This is a digital-preservation project first. Expect rough edges; please contribute sample files and bug reports.
Rescore reads the common-notation content of a legacy .mus file and converts it to MusicXML 4.0.
Supported today:
- Detects the
.muscontainer and era from its embedded signatures, and decompresses the document's internal data structures. - Notes: pitch (name, octave, accidental), duration (whole through 16th, dotted), chords, and rests.
- Measure attributes: key signature, time signature (including compound meters such as 6/8 and 9/8), and clef (treble, bass, alto, tenor).
- Structure: multiple measures with correct barring, multiple staves and parts (such as a piano grand staff), and multiple voices per staff.
- Marks: ties, tuplets, slurs, articulations (staccato, accent, tenuto, marcato, fermata), lyrics with hyphenation, and dynamics (p, f, mp, mf, and so on, plus crescendo and diminuendo hairpins).
- Emits
score-partwiseMusicXML 4.0. - An optional desktop GUI: drag a
.musfile in and get a.musicxmlnext to it.
Not yet handled: grace notes, ornaments, beaming detail, chord symbols, repeats and endings, page layout / fonts / engraving, and MIDI/PDF/SVG export. Semantic fidelity comes first: the goal is that a musician opens the result and recognizes their piece.
This is a digital-preservation project; please contribute sample files and bug reports.
Rescore is C++20 and builds with CMake (>= 3.24) on Windows, macOS, and Linux. The converter and CLI have no third-party dependencies; the test suite and the optional GUI fetch theirs automatically via CMake.
cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --config ReleaseBy default this builds the rescore-cli command-line tool, written to build/bin/ (under a per-config subfolder, e.g. build/bin/Release/, on multi-config generators such as Visual Studio).
The desktop GUI (the main rescore app) is built with -DRESCORE_BUILD_GUI=ON. On Linux it needs X11/OpenGL/GTK development packages (e.g. xorg-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libgtk-3-dev). For a dependency-free build of just the CLI, add -DRESCORE_BUILD_TESTS=OFF.
GUI: open the rescore app and drag a .mus file onto the window (or pick one with the file dialog). It writes a .musicxml next to the original.
CLI: convert a single file:
rescore-cli in.mus -o out.musicxmlUseful flags:
--dumpprints a summary of the detected container (era, version string, byte order)--helpprints the full usage
Output is score-partwise MusicXML 4.0.
Your scores never leave your computer. Nothing is uploaded. Rescore processes files entirely locally. It does not store, upload, log, retain, or transmit your files or their musical content.
MIT. See LICENSE.
Not affiliated with MakeMusic; Finale is a trademark of its owner. Product names are used only nominatively, to describe the file format Rescore reads.