Remove "Pause" property from Inspector for breath mark or make it 'stealing' time from preceeding duration

Well, I don't necessarily mind them having the property, as long as it defaults to zero. Or is implemented like an articulation, slightly shortening the preceding note.

How about a negative value, made to mean to 'steal' from preceeding note?

I also vote for keeping the possibility of using the 'breathe mark' as a caesura, since I've seen it being used that way, and depending on the situation, e.g. for a singer, stealing from the previous note might not give sufficient time to breathe.

Providing the 'steal from preceding note' would of course be nice, and I actually like Jojo's idea with negative numbers. But I'm not sure if this might seem unintuitive to some users. Maybe it would be clearer to have a separate property for it.

I thought of the negative value too after posting, and I do think it's a good idea. I wouldn't worry too much about intuitiveness here since the majority of the time the defaults should be good, and seeing a negative value in that field by default will show the user that this is how to do it.

It's probably not too hard to implement but tricky because it is entirely different than the current implementation. Right now the effect is on the tempo map but the new proposed effect for negative values will be on note event lengths. Totally separate areas is code involved. Not sure that's a good enough reason you use a separate property instead of positive/negative but something to think about.

came up in https://musescore.org/en/node/116436 again.
somewhat related: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/2695

Came up again in https://musescore.org/en/2.1#comment-713531

came up again in https://musescore.org/en/node/290353

The check marks (like ✓ ) are stealing time, whereas the breath marks (like ❜ ) are supposed to insert extra time.

Probably there needs to be an option for either. In the instrumental ensemble world. breath marks would never ever add time. Everyone breathes at different times. The rest of the ensemble won't wait for just the oboe players :-)

Then you use the “check” breath mark instead of the “apostrophe” one (or the cæsura).

I checked this in Gould’s book (and had to change quite some apostrophes to checks in my scores to match).

The check mark might be common for instrumental music in the UK; that I can't say. In the US, though, it's normally the apostrophe. And it never means to add time in that context. So, again, best would be for both options to be available: the "steal time" interpretation, and the "add time".

I think what happened is that people didn’t know the difference and used them interchangably. (Like forgetting the 8vb sign on the clef for vocal tenor.)

Gould is pretty clear for both vocal…

… and instrumental music:

I think that modern editions should honour the standard. I’m not averse to a checkbox in the inspector for all kinds of breath marks to denote whether time should be subtracted or injected, but the default clearly ought to follow Gould.

(“never” means to add time is just stupid to not have; I have scores where both appear, for good reasons.)

Consider educating the people.

What should I do to make this happen without adding/stealing tempo to the song? What I need is that the tempo in the music stays locked all the way through. In other words, I want to shorten the values of the notes for breath, but without having to write them with pauses, in order to hear this effect.

Currently, I’m doing the following:

• drag the “Breath mark (tick-like)” on the note to be shortened
• keep its “Pause” value in the inspector at 0
• use the Pianoroll Editor to shorten the note by reducing the offtime; I have a relatively complex system of which offtimes I use (search in http://www.mirbsd.org/music/0-README.txt for “Shortening notes”) so that, even if one stave has a whole note, one a half, one a dotted half and another a quarter note, they all use the same time to take breath

HTH & HAND!

Mirabilos, I really appreciate your help, and your solution certainly would work nicely in MS3, but unfortunately, as of today, MS4 has no Piano Roll Editor yet.

Ah, well, maybe don’t use such banana software yet before the first somewhat usable release. This was true for all .0 and especially .0.0 releases so far…

… or just edit the .mscx file directly and add appropriate Event tags.

I've never heard the term "banana software" before your post. I had to google to find the meaning for this term. Now I know. Thanks.

You know it's meaning though? In case you don't; Bananas are normally harvested before they are ripe and shipped green. They are supposed to "post-ripe" on their way to or at the customer