Can the MuseScore Startup Wizard be disabled?

[Fazza]

Just testing MuseScore on some of our PCs as our Head of Music has requested it be installed on a bank of laptops and the Music Computer Suite.

 

As we're a school with 1200+ students, local profiles are removed after each logon to prevent the hard disk drives from filling up, as such we try to disable as many things that are supposed to run just the once as possible as because the local profile is created each time a student logs on it will run each time thinking it's the first time it has been run.

 

With this in mind, does anybody know if there is a way of disabling the MuseScore Startup Wizard? Normally we'd do this sort of thing in a relavent Group Policy but I dont think MuseScore.org has created any ADMX files that we can use (at least I can't find any).

 

[jthompson]

I'm just checking whether this method still works for the current version of MuseScore, but we've been deploying 3.3.0 successfully with the following.

 

After installing Musescore on a reference machine, run it and configure it as you want. Then grab the MuseScore3.ini file from the local user profile. Ours contains the following:

 

[application]
startup\firstStart=false
keyboardLayout=UK-QWERTY

[ui]
application\startup\showTours=false
application\startup\checkUpdate=false
application\startup\showSplashScreen=true
application\startup\showStartCenter=false

 

We then have a startup script that copies that ini file into the default user profile of the machine, if it doesn't already exist, as "C:\Users\Default\Appdata\Roaming\MuseScore\MuseScore3.ini".

 

The script also runs the following command after copying down the file, to set the owner as SYSTEM (required in order for the ini file to get copied into new user profiles).

icacls "C:\Users\Default\Appdata\Roaming\MuseScore" /setowner "SYSTEM" /T

 

The MuseScrore MSI is then just deployed as normal. Each new user profile on the machine will automatically have the preprepared MuseScore3.ini file that will suppress the first-run stuff.

[jthompson]

Testing with v3.6.2.5, the lines in that ini file in my last post all still work, but there's a new telemetry option on first-run which can be disabled by adding the following lines into the [application] section:

 

telemetry\allowed=false
startup\telemetry_access_requested=3.4.1

 

It's worth noting that the user's ini file will fill up with lots of other config options specific to the user once they actually run MuseScore (paths, recent files, etc.), so the ini file that you place into the default user profile needs to be pared back like above.

[3s-gtech]

You may be able to do the above with GPP using the file option too. That way, you can manage it without needing to change permissions.

[Fazza]

Thanks for the great replies - I wonder if it could be put in the Default User Profile so it gets copied across to each newly created local profile that way? I might give that a go and see what happens. It wont take long to test and if it doesnt work then I'll do what you've mentioned above and get it copied across each time a user logs on.

 

Thanks

[supportman]

A little off topic, but strange you need to delete local profiles. Your students logins must take about 3 x as long having to create a new profile each time...

 

We are 1,100 and have local logins, works well and we only have 256gb SSD's in machines as standard. We just delprof them at the end of the year generally.

[jthompson]

Thanks for the great replies - I wonder if it could be put in the Default User Profile so it gets copied across to each newly created local profile that way? I might give that a go and see what happens. It wont take long to test and if it doesnt work then I'll do what you've mentioned above and get it copied across each time a user logs on.

 

Thanks

 

Yes, you can definitely put it into the default user profile. That's what our computer startup script does (the GPP files approach would be a neater option, but I've not tried that one yet to know that it does the trick here). As you say, once it's in the default user profile, that takes care of it for each new user profile created on the system.

 

Our students' user profiles are only removed if they're older than a couple of weeks or so iirc (using delprof), so it may be that some students are benefitting from MuseScore being able to track their recent files, etc. if they use the same machine lesson to lesson.

[Fazza]

A little off topic, but strange you need to delete local profiles. Your students logins must take about 3 x as long having to create a new profile each time...

 

We are 1,100 and have local logins, works well and we only have 256gb SSD's in machines as standard. We just delprof them at the end of the year generally.

 

We only have 120GB SSDs in some computers so they easily get filled up as we dont have the luxury of time to run delprof throughout the year - we're stretched across 4 very busy Academies so need as many things to take care of themselves.