MusicEase was initially created under DOS using muLisp The first version appeared in 1987 and was completely controlled by the keyboard.
In February, 2024, the standard version of MusicEase was released free to the general public under Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 4.0.
As a score editor, the user can create, edit, play and print high quality music notation.
The result is that users can create professional looking scores easily and quickly without knowing music engraving/music copyist rules.
Jerry Pournelle, reviewer for Byte Magazine, says The samples [of music printouts from MusicEase] I have seen, and a couple I have produced, are sure in the same league as hand engraved.
Blocks can be cut from one location and pasted into another location and then everything can be reformatted with just several keystrokes (using MusicEase's cast-off function which redetermines system breaks so that the density of notes in each system is roughly the same followed by the justify function to stretch/shrink all staves so they horizontally span from the left margin to the right margin).
Most functions are invoked via key presses which allows fast content entry as opposed to using the mouse to drag music notational elements from palettes to staves which generally requires more effort.
MusicEase supports a number of additional generally useful functions such as true transposition (as opposed to just shifting existing configurations up or down on the staff), part extraction (any combination of system staves can be extracted), scaling of the music to a large range of sizes, inverting or retrograding selected blocks of notes, combining 2 staves containing single voices into a single staff containing mixed single and double stemmed voicing and vice versa (splitting a single staff with several voices into 2 separate staves, each containing a single voice), automatically adding chord fret diagrams, using any computer fonts for verses, titles, etc., unicode text support, and displaying music as tablature and/or as shape notes (4 or 7 shape systems --- the shapes associated with scale degrees can be fully customized).
The Christian Virtual Hymnal 15K newly supports the import of custom choral music created with MusicEase Professional.