Could Note Input be Prescriptive?

• Jan 28, 2025 - 04:11

Thanks for the good job you have done & how active your developers are on here.

Currently the rhythm & accidental input in Musescore (MUS) is prescriptive: in Note Input mode, you press the number key before pressing the letter. In Noteflight (NF), it can be post-scriptive: you can type the note letter, then make the rhythm size smaller or larger using [ or ]. I like NF’s method more because its faster in thinking time & correction speed.

For example, if I sing a melody & hear a G then A (dotted 8th then 16th), both a quarter note & a dotted eighth feel the same at the beginning, but I realize it’s a dotted eighth because it’s “stopped short” by the following 16th note. In MUS if I accidentally type a G quarter note, to correct it I would press: left arrow + think in my head + 4 + . + G + think + 3 + A (6 keys with more thinking). In NF, to correct this, I would just press [ + . + A + [ (4 keys with less thinking).

Part of what contributes to this in MUS is the functionality of note input is contained both in and outside Note Input Mode. If you eliminated Note Input Mode, similar to NF, I think it would make things faster:)

Thanks in advance!


Comments

In reply to by frfancha

To be honest, this is why I write longer descriptions. This post is a shortened version of a longer post because someone said longer posts tend to get ignored. (https://musescore.org/en/node/373876)

This isn’t just solved by Q and W, which I was already aware of. Yes, it makes it one step shorter than using the numbers, but it’s still prescriptive and requires a lot more thinking on my end. The great part is that outside note input mode, you can change notes post-scriptively. The problem is that when you change a note, it automatically brings you back into note input mode, so you couldn’t continue. The other issue is toggling the size up and down is only with or without the dots (creating multiple shortcuts, more learning and confusion). If you just tried Noteflight free for an hour, you would see that it’s a simpler process to learn and faster.

In this particular instance you could exit note-entry mode, select the first quarter note and type “.” — this will leave the following note as an eighth. It’s a useful trick to know if you are inputting a lot of this pattern — think Dvorak’s Humoresque in Db. (At least, it works in MS3.)

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