Files

Maestro saves scores in its own format, but it also opens Finale, MuseScore, MusicXML and MIDI files and PDFs exported from a notation program, and exports PDF, PNG and SVG images, MusicXML, MIDI and audio. This chapter covers opening and saving, what happens with files from other programs, how autosave and backups protect your work, and how to put together a setlist.

The commands are in the File menu on both Mac and Windows.

Opening a score

• Choose File → Open… (⌘O, on Windows Ctrl+O).
• Or double-click the file, or drag it onto the Maestro icon (Mac) or the Maestro window (Windows).
• Recently opened files are in File → Open Recent.

Open scores sit side by side as tabs in the same window. On the Mac these are standard macOS tabs, and reopening a file that is already open brings its tab to the front instead of opening it twice. On Windows you switch tabs with Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab or from View → Open Documents, and close a tab with Ctrl+W or its ×.

Formats

Format	Extension	Opens	Saves / exports
Maestro	.maestro	yes (also old .partitura files)	yes
Finale	.musx	yes	yes
Finale, old format	.mus	yes	no
MuseScore 3 and 4	.mscz, .mscx	yes	no
Sibelius, Dorico	.sib, .dorico	no: Maestro explains how to export them as MusicXML	no
MusicXML	.musicxml, .xml	yes	yes
Compressed MusicXML	.mxl	yes	yes
MIDI	.mid, .midi	yes	yes
PDF	.pdf	yes, if exported from a notation program	yes
Image	.png, .svg	no	yes
Audio	.m4a, .wav	no	yes

Finale files

Maestro reads .musx files directly, without going through MusicXML: staves and names, clefs, key and time signatures, notes, chords, rests, layers, tuplets, braces and brackets, transposing instruments, drums with their percussion map, grace notes, articulations, dynamics, slurs, hairpins, text, rehearsal marks, chord symbols, lyrics, repeats, endings, jumps and rhythmic slashes, plus beaming, composite time signatures (3+3+2/8), notes spelled enharmonically (D♭ instead of C♯), trills and guitar fretboards above the chord symbols when Finale shows them. Page format and layout come across too, with systems and pages as Finale had them. Each system shows the staves it showed in Finale (for example only the choir, or only the congregation with the organ), as long as they are silent there: a staff with notes is never hidden. Time signatures hidden in Finale (free chant, intonations) stay hidden, and where Finale left out courtesy time and key signatures at the end of a system, so does Maestro. If systems that sat side by side in Finale don’t fit on the page, Maestro stacks them without leaving pages almost empty. To switch to Maestro’s more compact layout, see Layout and printing. The file also opens with its music font and text fonts, which come with Maestro, so it looks as it did in Finale even without Finale installed (see Music font and text fonts).

Notes in “voice 2” come in too (in a free layer of the measure, see Voice 2), as do hidden notes and rests. Figured bass, which in Finale was written as lyrics in the Finale Numerics font, comes in as real figured bass under the same notes (see Notation → Chord Symbols and Lyrics → Figured Bass…). Figures written in Eisenach (the font of the DotMus scores, such as the Bach cantatas) come in too; with other figured bass fonts single figures come in, and the message says how many are missing.

If anything couldn’t be imported, a message lists it after the file opens, with how many there are: for example custom lines (dashed lines, brackets) and drawn symbols.

A file that doesn’t open well? The message after opening has a Report the File… button, and the same command is in Help → Report a File That Doesn’t Open Well… (with a file open it offers that one, otherwise you choose one). It prepares a message for the people who develop Maestro with the file, the version, the system and the warnings shown when opening it: write what’s wrong and send it yourself. On the Mac, with Mail, the file is already attached; otherwise the file opens selected in the Finder or File Explorer, ready to drag into the message. The file is used only to fix Maestro: from then on, every new version checks that it opens well.

The older .mus format, which Finale used up to version 25 (2018), opens too: staves, notes, dynamics and expressions with the tempo, articulations, slurs, hairpins, repeats and endings, percussion, layout and lyrics come across. Chord symbols from .mus files don’t yet: for those, open the file in Finale and save it as .musx, or export it as MusicXML.

In .mus files a verse’s number is the number of its text, and Finale moves the lines close to the staff by hand: Maestro puts verses that don’t overlap (for instance those of different movements) on the same line, and verses sung together on different lines.

Finale 2000–2006 .mus files use an older internal form: the title, composer and arranger are taken from the texts on the first page with music, while the layout and percussion don’t come across and Maestro lays the score out itself. Files saved with the very first versions of Finale, from the early 1990s, can’t be opened.

MuseScore files

Maestro opens MuseScore 3 and 4 files directly (.mscz, and uncompressed .mscx): staves and names, clefs, key and time signatures, pickup measures, notes, chords, rests, the four voices, tuplets (nested ones too), braces and brackets, transposing instruments, drums, tablature, grace notes, articulations, dynamics, slurs, hairpins, octave lines, text lines, glissandos, metronome marks, rehearsal marks, chord symbols, lyrics with their verses, repeats, endings, segno, coda and jumps, measure repeats and rhythmic slashes. Page format and system and page breaks come across too.

If anything couldn’t be imported (fingerings, guitar chord diagrams…), a message lists it after the file opens. Files from MuseScore 2 or earlier must first be opened and saved again with MuseScore 3 or 4.

MIDI files

A MIDI file becomes a real score: one part per track, named after the track, with the instrument matching its General MIDI sound (and its transposition, such as trumpet in B♭). Piano goes on two staves, channel 10 on a drum staff. Title, tempo, meter and key come from the file; tempo changes become “♩ = …” markings.

Notes are transcribed like a recording, using the quantization grid and triplet recognition chosen in Settings → MIDI (see MIDI keyboard). MIDI files timed in frames (SMPTE) can’t be read.

PDFs exported from a notation program

If all you have is the PDF of a score written with MuseScore, Finale, Sibelius, LilyPond, Maestro or another notation program, open it with File → Open… like any other file. In these PDFs the music symbols are characters of a music font (such as Bravura and Leland, the old Maestro, Jazz and Broadway Copyist of Finale, Opus and Reprise of Sibelius, or Emmentaler of LilyPond) and staves, stems and beams are lines: Maestro reads them directly, in a moment and without recognizing images, and this also works in the Mac App Store version.

You get the notes with their durations, chords, rests (multimeasure rests too), accidentals, ties, tuplets and two voices on the same staff; clefs, key and time signatures; double barlines, repeats with first and second endings, segno, coda, D.C., D.S. and Fine; octave lines (8va, 8vb, 15ma: the notes come back at the right pitch); trills, mordents, turns and arpeggios; lyrics with their verses, chord symbols, dynamics, hairpins, articulations, fermatas, rehearsal marks, the metronome mark, title and composer. Empty staves hidden in some systems go back to their place thanks to the instrument names. The original PDF opens next to the score, as for scanned scores (see below).

Notes written as slashes (rhythmic notation for guitar) and the pitches of percussion cannot be reconstructed; tablature staves are skipped, because the same notes are in the staff above. A PDF of separate parts, one instrument after another (each part on a new page with the title), becomes a score with all the instruments, if the parts have the same number of measures. If the PDF is a scan, Maestro tells you, and you can use the recognition described below.

Scanned scores (OMR)

File → Import Scanned Score… recognizes the notes in a PDF or in images of the pages (PNG, JPEG, TIFF) with Audiveris, a free, open-source optical music recognition (OMR) program. The first time, Maestro offers to download it from the official website and install it in its own folder (about 85 MB, accepting Audiveris’s AGPL license); if you already installed it, you can point to it with “Find…”.

• Choose the PDF, or the photos of the pages in order: they become a single score. If the PDF was exported from a notation program, Maestro reads it directly, without Audiveris.
• The first time, Maestro offers to download the language data (15–25 MB each) that Audiveris uses to read lyrics, chord symbols, title and composer. You can also go on without it: only the notes come through.
• Recognition takes a few seconds per page; the progress shows in a window (on Windows in the status bar). Instruments that Audiveris splits across systems (full name in the first, abbreviated in the following ones) come back as a single staff.

When recognition is finished, the original scan opens next to the score (View → Original Scan to reopen it): the measure you’re working on, with the cursor or selected, is highlighted on the page, which changes by itself; clicking a measure in the scan selects it in the score. The scan is saved with the document; when you have finished correcting, Document → Remove Scan from Document… makes the file lighter.

Before recognition Maestro turns pages lying on their side or upside down the right way up, straightens crooked pages (up to about 8 degrees, by looking at the staff lines) and evens out the background of photos and shadowed photocopies: a page scanned a little askew, which Audiveris alone would not read, comes through as if it were straight.

Always check the result. It works very well with sharp printed music, at 300 dpi; it gets worse with very faded photocopies, with the handwritten-style fonts of jazz charts and with guitar tablature, which it doesn’t read. If a clef or time signature is wrong, fix it first: all the following notes depend on it. The Mac App Store version of Maestro doesn’t have this command, because it can’t start other programs. In the Microsoft Store version Maestro doesn’t install Audiveris itself: “Open the Audiveris Website” takes you to the download page, and once it’s installed Maestro finds it by itself.

Saving

• File → Save (⌘S, on Windows Ctrl+S).
• File → Save As… (⇧⌘S, on Windows Ctrl+Shift+S).

A Finale, MuseScore, MusicXML or MIDI file is never overwritten: the first save asks where to save the score in Maestro format. If you close a score (or Maestro) with unsaved changes, Maestro asks whether to save them.

Exporting

Command	Mac	Windows
Export PDF…	⇧⌘P	from the File menu
Export Image…	from the menu	from the File menu
Export MusicXML…	⇧⌘E	from the File menu
Export Compressed MusicXML (.mxl)…	from the menu	from the File menu
Export Finale (.musx)…	from the menu	from the File menu
Export MIDI…	from the menu	from the File menu
Export Audio…	⌥⇧⌘E	from the File menu

• PDF: the pages as in Page View. In a part view, the part is exported.
• MusicXML: for passing the score to MuseScore, Dorico, Sibelius or Finale. The file carries the layout too (systems, pages and staff spacing), so the other program opens it with the same systems. In a part view, the part is exported. Compressed .mxl is smaller and read by the same programs.
• Finale (.musx): for people still using Finale. The file opens in Finale 27 with notes, slurs, articulations, dynamics, hairpins, text, lyrics, chord symbols, repeats, endings and jumps, drums, fixed stem directions, slash notation and measure repeats, octave lines, pedal marks, lines such as “cresc. – – –” and “rit.”, glissandos, tremolos and arpeggios, braces and brackets, tempo markings and rehearsal marks, each instrument’s sound, and with Maestro’s layout: page, systems, pages and note spacing. Finale creates the parts from Document → Manage Parts. In a part view the part is exported.
• MIDI: the notes as they play, with title, track names, key signature, mixer volume and pan, swing, tempo changes and chord accompaniment. Reimported into Maestro, the file comes back with the same notes.
• Image: PNG or SVG, to put in a document, a presentation or a message. See Exporting an image.
• Audio: M4A or WAV, the whole score, each part alone, or a backing track without each part. See Exporting audio.

For printing and for extracting parts as PDF or MusicXML, see Layout and printing.

Exporting an image

File → Export Image… saves the music as an image, just as it appears in Page View, even if you are working in Scroll View. In the dialog, choose:

• Format: PNG, the ordinary image for documents, messages and websites, or SVG, vector, sharp at any size.
• Export: The visible page, All pages (one file per page) or The selected measures.
• Resolution (PNG): 150, 300 or 600 dots per inch. The higher it is, the sharper the image and the bigger the file.
• Transparent background: without the white of the paper, to place the music on a colored background.

To export just a few measures, select them first with the Selection tool (selected notes work too: their measures count). The image crops just those staves, with a little margin for dynamics and text. If the selection runs onto the next page, you get one image per page. With nothing selected, The selected measures isn’t available.

File names come from the title: with several pages Maestro adds “page 1”, “page 2”…, with measures “measure 5” or “measures 5–12”. When there is more than one file, on the Mac you choose the folder to save them in; on Windows you choose the name of the first one and the others go in the same folder.

In a part view, the part is exported, and the part name goes into the file name. Your choices are remembered for next time.

Autosave and backups

In Settings → General, under Saving (Maestro → Settings… on the Mac, Edit → Settings… on Windows):

• Autosave: never (the default), every minute, or every 2, 5 or 10 minutes. It only applies to Maestro documents that have been saved once, not to imported files.
• Keep a copy of the previous version at every save (on by default): before overwriting a document, Maestro keeps the previous version. It keeps the last five copies of each document.
• Show Copies… opens the backups folder in Finder or File Explorer.

Each copy has the date and time of the save in its name. To recover a version, open it with Open… and save it under a new name.

If Maestro quits unexpectedly

The next time you start it, Maestro tells you and offers to send us the crash report. The report contains only technical data: the version, the system and the place in the program where it happened.

• Send by Email… prepares a message with the report: add what you were doing and send it.
• Show the Report opens the reports folder (“Arresti anomali”, next to Maestro’s sounds), to attach the file by hand.
• Not Now leaves it: that report is not offered again.

Recent documents

File → Open Recent lists the files you opened or saved most recently. You choose how many to remember in Settings → General.

On the Mac, in addition:

• files are found even after you move or rename them; deleted ones drop off the list;
• when two files share a name, their folder is shown too;
• Clear Menu empties the list;
• the same recent files are in the Dock menu (right-click the Maestro icon), together with New Score….

Setlist PDF and audio

File → Setlist (PDF and Audio)… collects several pieces into one PDF, for a gig or a book of tunes.

1. Add the pieces (Maestro, MusicXML, Finale, MuseScore or MIDI files), dragging them into the window if you like.
2. Reorder them with the arrows or by dragging rows, and remove the ones you don’t need.
3. Enter the collection title and choose whether to put an index at the beginning.
4. Choose the content: the full score or a part.
5. Create the PDF. On Windows you can also print the setlist directly.

The PDF starts with the index (title, composer and page of each piece) and has continuous page numbers across all the pieces. The list, title and choices are remembered for next time.

One instrument’s part

Type an instrument name, even just part of it (“Trumpet”, “Sax”): Maestro takes that part from every piece, so each musician gets their own book. The name is also matched in the other language: “Tromba” finds “Trumpet 1”, and “Sax” finds all the saxophones. Pieces without that part are skipped and listed at the end.

Setlist audio

Export Audio… in the setlist window gives you the pieces to listen to, each played as in playback, as M4A or WAV, with or without the metronome. You can get:

• one file per piece, numbered in list order (“01 - Autumn Leaves”);
• a single file with a pause between pieces (0 to 20 seconds) and, next to it, a text list with each piece’s start time.

With a part chosen you can also export the backing track without that part, to rehearse the gig by playing along, or the part on its own.