I am hearing voices
Many times when I scan a piece into MXL, then open it in Musescore, Musescore (or the scan software) will assign random voices to the music. Sometimes, I will have 3 different voices in one measure. Sometimes a 3 note chord will be in 3 voices! That is inconvenient enough, but the major frustration is that Musescore many times does not let me change the voices even when there are no other voices in the measure. I can see not being able to change a 3rd voice into a 1st voice when there is already a 1st voice that fills out the measure, but many times the WHOLE measure is in the 3rd voice, but Musescore will NOT let me change the notes to 1st voice.
I am writing this in the General comments forum because I don't know whether this is a bug or just expected behavior when you scan a piece of music into Musescore. The workaround I have is to delete the notes and retype them into the measure in 1st voice. That is veeeerrry inconvenient, when you have scanned the music in the first place so that you don't have to type the notes. I included a piece to demonstrate what I mean. Measure 13 is all in 3rd voice, but it won't let me change it to first voice.
| Attachment | Size |
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| Different voices.mscz | 30.42 KB |
Comments
What are you using to scan the music? It is likely this that is generating an XML file with many voices. MuseScore then just takes this XML file and interprets it accordingly.
In your example, MuseScore lets me change from Voice3 to 1 with no problem - select measure, Tools >Voices >Exchange Voice 1->3.
I use OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Arch.: x86_64, MuseScore version (64-bit): 3.2.3., revision: d2d863f. Maybe it's something specifiv to your OS, MS version etc.?
In reply to What are you using to scan… by underquark
Thank you. The way you do it worked!. I have always been doing it by highlighting the notes and hitting the 1,2,3,4 voices button. Thank you so much for your help. Don't know why hitting the voices buttons don't work. Oh well. BTW: I use Audiveris to scan. I figured it was Audiveris that was assigning the weird voices, not Musescore.
In reply to Thank you. The way you do… by odelphi231
The voices buttons allow a limited amount of shifting between voices, but it's really meant for a few notes here and there and it won't handle tuplets or certain other cases. The commands in Tools / Voices are the more general way to do larger scale shifts.
In reply to The voices buttons allow a… by Marc Sabatella
I was so happy to know there is a way to change voices that I started correcting wrong voices in my score until I came across a situation where I did not want to exchange voice 1 for voice 3. I just wanted to change a voice 3 into a voice 1 on ONE note. The Tools/voices option does not work for that. I also could not get the voices buttons to work. I guess there are situations where nothing is going to work except to just delete the note and re-notate it. In my example, I had a 4-note chord where 3 notes were voice 1 and one note was voice 2. I could not get the voice 2 to change to voice 1. I had to delete and start over.
In reply to I was so happy to know there… by odelphi231
As I said, the single-note method won't work for tuplets, because you can't have just one note of a triplet. And even if you try moving them all, it still works one at a time, so it can't allow that currently. And you can't move a note if there is something in the destination that actually conflicts. It isn't clear what note exactly you tried to move in your example, but I saw a lot of triplets and assumed that was probably the issue.
Anyhow, these two methods work in a lot of cases; in other case cut & paste might be the answer. But in a few cases here and there, you might indeed have to just re-enter some notes.