MuseScore Constantly Crashing

• Aug 10, 2022 - 00:55

Hi,

I just installed MuseScore on a new computer. I've had this computer for about a week and have installed just a few programs (which I know are trustworthy and which I have used on previous computers). I am having trouble running the latest sub-version of 3.6.2 because it keeps crashing. It seems random -- I was able to enter a complete score with no problem, but when I started adding lyrics, though, the crashes began, and seemed to get more and more frequent. Now I can't add more than a word or two before it crashes. It always offers to restore the previous version, but the previous version doesn't include my recent changes and I have to enter them all over again.

I thought the problem might be with Windows 11, but the only two forum threads I was able to find about Windows 11 said that it's compatible.

Help, please!

Comments

• Aug 10, 2022 - 19:31

I don't see any crashes just kind of randomly fiddling around. Can you give precise steps to reproduce the problem?

One thing I can see is the tab seems to not have been set up properly, as it's giving warnings left and right about notes out of range and the notes shown don't seem to match. But I can't tell exactly what you might have done wrong.

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• Aug 10, 2022 - 20:40

"Tab" = abbreviation for tablature. The bottom staff in your score. The notes there are all wrong. The very first note - a G - is not found on the 3rd fret of the top string on a standard ukulele. So it's completely messed up. Not sure how it got that way. The warnings are the red squares around the bad notes - most of them are just wrong.

Probably best at this point to go to Edit / Instruments, add an entirely new ukulele with both standards and tab staves, then copy and paste the music from the standard staff of the original to the new one, then delete the original. But anything you can share about how this got so messed would be useful - how did you create the score, how did you enter the notes, did you mess with the staff settings, etc.

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• Aug 10, 2022 - 21:23

Oh, right, I should have known that. I hadn't even looked at the tablature. It's supposed to be linked, so I assumed it was correct. I did wonder about the red squares.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll see if I can do that.

I didn't change any settings. I entered all the notes by clicking on N, then the note icon (for length) and entered the note name using the keyboard. As far as I know, I did everything according to the manual, with help from this:

https://www.flpages.com/2020/07/musescore-ukulele.html?utm_source=pocke…

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• Aug 10, 2022 - 21:37

You must have done something pretty markedly different from that, though, because those are the steps that do work. Are you sure you started with File / New and selecting ukulele as your instrument? You doin't start with the default empty piano score and try to coerce it to work more like ukulele by fiddling with the staff properties? It kind of acts like that. although not completely, either. If I go to Edit / Instruments and look at the dropdown list for staff type, ukulele tablature isn't even listed as an option. This is what makes it seem that someone very unusual and not correct has happened to this score - it doesn't behave like a ukulele score should at all.

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• Aug 10, 2022 - 23:15

I really have no idea what happened. Yes, I started with File / New and selected ukulele. I followed these instructions from the link above (it also includes images, which didn't copy):

Next, on Choose template file window, select "Choose Instruments", and click on Next button.

Select "Strings - Plucked" and select "Ukulele" in the column and click on Add button to add to instrument list in the right column.

The Ukulele should appear in the right column with the staff name Staff 1, Treble clef and standard staff type.
Select Staff 1, click on "Add Linked Staff" button, another new staff will be added in the right column, click on Staff type drop down box to change it to "Tab. Ukulele".

I followed your earlier suggestion and repeated these EXACT steps to create the staves, added time signature and tempo, then copied and pasted the contents of the standard staff from my initial score. Everything worked perfectly and the tablature looks good (no red); I played several measures and they matched what was in the standard staff. So I went ahead and added two more verses without incident. Not a single crash and the score saves with no problem.

I actually created this based on a user-submitted score (to give me practice); for the life of me, I cannot find the online scores right now. The one thing I have left to do is to add the text section markers and above-the-staff repeat symbols and words. I'm sure the instructions for how to do that are there somewhere in the manual, but I haven't found them yet. :-(

Thanks again so very, very much for all your help. I still have no idea what I might have done wrong to cause the problems I was having, but it looks like I'm on the right path now and I have certainly learned a lot.

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• Aug 10, 2022 - 23:21

I'm glad doing it again seems to have fixed this. But it would definitely be good to understand how ti happened in the first place. If you ever see those red markings come back, maybe that will trigger you to remember exactly what you had just done before that.

To add repeat marking, see the repeat palette (and the Repeats section of the Handbook for more info). For other text, try staff text (Ctrl+T) and/or rehearsal marks (Ctrl+M).

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• Aug 11, 2022 - 22:00

Thank you, cadiz1! You found it. Thank you for the links. As you said in your bug report, this is confusing. When I created my first score, I saw this and my first inclination was to leave it -- and then I thought, "Those are the sounds the strings make when they're open, so maybe I should check the open boxes" -- which I did. As mlutz said, "Open has another meaning in guitar terminology (open tunings)..." It has another meaning in ukulele terminology, too.

I noticed in the discussion thread that I wasn't the first one to crash when making this mistake. :-)

I liked the idea of a tool tip. There was a comment, though, that appeared to indicate that this is fixed in version 4. Hopefully!

When Marc suggested that I start over and copy the score into a new staff, I followed the same procedure as the first time, and when I got to Strings Tuning, I vacillated, but since I'd been confused the first time, I decided to leave them unchecked this time -- with it not even occurring to me that this might be the cause of the crashing! Of course, this time everything worked great.

Just out of curiosity, I went back to my first score, and (after a couple of crashes) managed to uncheck the boxes. And everything looks good now for that score as well.

Thanks again.

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