A music notation engraving library

The release 6.3 of Verovio brings a range of new features, rendering improvements, and bug fixes. It adds support for volta and refrain, and of pt and vu support for MEI font sizes. Turkish accidentals have been added, as well as a new --show-hidden option for displaying hidden elements.

The experimental editor API has been updated, alongside various improvements to the MusicXML importer. The Python build process has also been fully updated.

The release 6.1 of Verovio is the first to use the development version of the MEI Schema since MEI 5.1. This means that upcoming features of MEI will now start to be implemented in Verovio. This is the case for staff-like tablature notation, for which initial support has been added (thanks to @paul-bayleaf).

In addition to improvements to the rendering (key signatures, mixed beams) and to some importers (MusicXML and CMME), this release also integrates support for ASCL custom tuning, implemented by @info-junkie. This does not represent a core feature, as it essentially targets the MIDI output, but it might be of interest to some users.

Release 6.0 is the first release of 2026, and it introduces several important new features. One of the highlights is support for ossia staves and ossia staff groups, which can now be placed above or below a staff. A set of new options makes it possible to control their appearance.

Verovio now processes repetitions (that is, expansions) by default when the output format is MIDI or a time map. The same behavior has been added to the MusicXML importer (thanks to @infojunkie). Bear this in mind when upgrading your system if you rely on the MIDI and the time map output. This default can be overridden using newly introduced, dedicated options.

The 5.7 release is likely to be the last update of the year. As always, this release incorporates valuable external contributions, for which we are grateful.

The most significant addition brought by this release is the support offset attributes, which allow minor visual adjustments to be encoded directly. This approach is recommended for edge cases or highly complex layout scenarios where automatic layout is problematic. The test suite includes examples, such as slurs, ties, and hairpins, showing how offsets can improve engraving results without requiring extensive manual positioning.

The changes introduced in release 5.6 are mostly small fixes and improvements, particularly in the timemap and MIDI output, and some data importers.

One notable enhancement is the improved layout of editorial (cautionary) accidentals. This new approach allows for more refined positioning, especially when they appear close to slurs. We may extend this method to other elements in the future.

Another addition in version 5.6 is a Python wheel for Ubuntu arm64. This makes it possible to use Verovio on that platform without requiring a lengthy build process.

The 5.5 release brings a new binding to Swift, which is distributed via the Swift Package Manager. This makes Verovio very easy to include and use in iOS applications. See the Reference book documentation for details on how to use the Swift binding.

Another new feature of 5.5 is the option to use the Liberation text font, which can be embedded or linked to in the SVG. This improves the rendering of text on platforms where Times or Times New Roman is not available by default, such as Android.

The 5.4 release includes several small improvements and fixes. The time map and MIDI output have been corrected for measure rests, particularly in the case of upbeat measures. Another update involves changes to the key names in the JSON output when retrieving time information for certain elements in the time map.

A notable change is the reduction of the initial memory allocation in the JavaScript toolkit. This significantly lowers Verovio’s memory usage in most cases, which will be especially beneficial on less powerful devices. It should not affect the loading of large files — the original reason for the higher memory allocation — but that level of allocation is no longer necessary. As a result, the verovio-toolkit-light version, which offered a lower memory footprint, is no longer provided.

The third release of this year (5.3) has been published. This release includes an important refactoring of the SVG structure – specifically, the way font glyphs are included in the SVG. If your project relies on the SVG structure, you may want to double-check that nothing breaks on your side when upgrading to this new version. A major advantage of the new structure is that it makes the SVG compatible with a wider range of SVG renderers.

Another important feature introduced in this version is support for editorial markup around the top-level score definition, allowing for more flexible alternate staff ordering and staff labeling.

A lower-level feature added in this release is a page-based MEI serialization option for temporarily storing and reloading laid-out data, which can be useful for caching in dynamic or server-side applications. This feature is still in development and will be consolidated and documented in upcoming releases.

Version 5.2 is now out with some nice contributions from external contributors. The first one is the implementation of tablature features newly introduced in MEI 5.1 as part of the E-Laute project.

The other contribution is the rendering of score annotations encoded with control events annot elements. This was implemented as part of a follow-up project of the Beethoven in the House project at the Oxford e-Research Centre.

The additional improvements brought in version 5.2 include better support for repetitions encoded with expansion elements, more flexible staff ordering, and support for SMuFL encoding for note heads.

Version 5.1 is now out with a couple of nice improvements. One of them is that the Cocoapods are now up-to-date!

One rendering improvement is the look of black mensural notation oblique ligatures with curved shape instead of straight polygons.

This release also improved the time map output of Verovio for grace notes are arpeggios, allowing for better synchronisation of the MIDI output (and potentially audio) and the scores rendered by Verovio.

The first version of Verovio in 2025 is now out as version 5.0. This is also the first version of Verovio supporting MEI 5.1 for both reading and writing.

One important feature in this new version is the support for scoring up mensural notation. This new feature was implemented by Martha E. Thomae with support of the NFDI4Culture with a grant to Anna Plaksin.

After a important 4.4 release that brought many improvements to the support for mensural notation and a new importer for CMME, Verovio 4.5 is now out! This version integrates luth tablature developments to be released in MEI 5.1.

This release of Verovio will be the last of version 4 releases since we are now adopting a new versioning scheme where the major number will be increased once per year, with version 5 in 2025. Switching to a development version of MEI will happen independently, whenever appropriate, which will give us more flexibility in integrating upcoming MEI features.

Verovio 4.0 is out! This is the first release based on MEI 5.0 and is an important milestone for the project. MEI 5.0 will remain the base for additional releases of Verovio 4.x. As always, this release includes various improvements. See the release announcement for more details about these.

The release of Verovio 4.0 follows the release scheme adopted since Verovio 2.0, which is to have even version numbers for Verovio releases implementing only features available in a stable version of MEI, and odd version numbers for releases based on a development version of MEI. When the MEI community will move to the development of MEI 6.0, and that some of the new MEI features will be implemented into Verovio while still being in a MEI development phase, Verovio will move to 5.0.

Verovio 3.13.0 is out!

One important change with this release is related to the Python binding and the way JSON objects are passed to or returned by it. It is no longer needed to stringify the JSON objects and the toolkit now takes and return Python dictionaries. Make sure you update your code if you update to the latest version!

Verovio has now a font fallback when the selected font is missing some glyphs. This fxes problem introduced in the latest release when improving text font support. Another new feature is the control of the log level, with four levels (info, warning, error and debug). Controlling the log level is also available for the Python and the JavaScript binding.

As always, this release includes many improvements of the rendering output of Verovio. It also includes some new options for controlling the output. See the release announcement for more details about these.

We are glad to announce the release of Verovio 3.10!

As always, this release includes many improvements of the rendering output of Verovio. It also includes some new options for controlling the output. See the release announcement for more details about these.

This release also includes a new select toolkit function which allows for some partial content of the score to be specified for rendering. Once selected, the portion of the score will be laid out and rendered as a normal score, which can result in multiple pages depending on the size of the selection and of the size of the output page. The documentation is in preparation and will be added to the Reference book.

Please note that there will be some changes in which development versions will be available through the development CI after the release of version 3.11 and that some of them are now deprecated.

The latest release of Verovio (3.4) comes with a new Reference book that gathers all the documentation for the project. This book is a collaborative work that we will continuously improve and adjust when new features are added to Verovio or when additional documentation appears to be desirable. Some of the sections of the book are still in preparation.

The book contains:

• an introduction to Verovio and the history of the project as well as an overview on how it can be used,
• some tutorials (still partially in preparation) on how to use it, starting at the very basic and ending at advanced topics in notation,
• some advanced topics with in-depth explanations of Verovio specifics,
• a toolkit reference with input and output formats as well as documentation for all methods and options,
• some instructions how to install it or how to build it from source,
• some guidelines for contributing to the project.

This online book is also available as PDF for users who prefer to have it in this format.

We welcome feedback and contributions. These can be made directly from the book through the “Edit page” button that leads to the online GitHub editor where the code of the page can be edited. The source code of the book and instructions for more advanced contributions are available here.

Although you would not know it from the number of news posts we have been busy this past year, releasing several major updates. The latest update, Verovio 3.3.0 is now available.

This release includes a number of improvements, including support for compressed MusicXML files (.mxl). In addition to the improvements to the core code, our contributors have been hard at work making Verovio available as a Python package over on the Python Package Index.

Several other notable improvements have been rolled in to Verovio over the past year. Here are just some highlights:

• Availability of the new SMuFL-compatible Leland font from MuseScore
• Significant improvements to the rendering of mensural and neume notation
• Many new musical symbols supported

… In addition to the standard list of bug fixes and improvements.

Many thanks to all of our contributors, and if you have a few minutes, go catch up on the Release Notes to see what else is in there.

Verovio 2.6.0 was released. This release includes many improvements from various contributors and initial support for Plaine and Easie output.

Verovio 2.3.0 was released. If you use NPM, make sure your configuration is updated to verovio in order to use the new features - verovio-dev has been deprecated.

Verovio 2.2.0 was released. It includes many improvements of the MusicXML import and many small fixes. This will be the last release through NPM verovio-dev. Please update to verovio.

Verovio 2.1.0 was released. In addition to the ABC import, it includes many improvements of the MusicXML import and many small fixes. Thanks to everyone who is contributing.

The upcoming version of Verovio (2.1) includes input via ABC notation. Checkout the documentation page for some examples.

Verovio 2.0.0 is out! This is the first stable release to support MEI 4.0. Many thanks to all the contributors.

We are making it even easier to embed music in a webpage, with just a few lines of code needed for displaying MEI or MusicXML files. Users can switch between a responsive and a document view. Checkout the JSFiddle.

Verovio is not fast enough for you? Try the WebAssembly version of the MEI Viewer that was just updated. With Webassembly, an upcoming standard for the web, it runs faster – more than 2x faster in Chrome.

The development version of the JavaScript toolkit of Verovio is now available as a Node.js package through NPM.

The MEI Viewer now includes a client-side PDF generation feature based on the excellent PDFKit JavaScript library. Please note that it is still an experimental feature.

Version 1.1 of Verovio was released. It includes a handful of new features and improvements. It is planned to be the last release based on MEI 3.0.

The Bach digital project now uses Verovio in its website for displaying music incipits coded in MEI.

Version 1.0 of Verovio was released. It uses MEI 3.0.0 and implements the most important features of music notation.