annoying clicking sound

• Apr 28, 2014 - 10:44

I'm using musescore 2.0 on a mac book air. When I play a score I sometimes here a clicking sound on notes that are held 2 or 3 or more beats. This might be a problem with musescore, or with the sample sounds, or with the mac itself (e.g., memory or IO limitation???)

I don't think it is the speaker because I hear the same thing on different headphones and when I output to external speakers.

Does anyone know something about this?

Comments

• Apr 28, 2014 - 12:42

Export the score as a sound file - midi, wav, flac... and hear how it plays.
For example, if the clicks propagate when saved as a midi file, there might be some note event that can be detected in a midi editor.

Maybe the metronome is turned on? ;-)

What soundfont are you using? If 'FluidR3_GM2-2.sf3', are there particular instruments that click when playing long notes?

(P.S. To avoid confusion with MuseScore 1.3, discussions about 2.0 are usually held in the 'Technology Preview' forum.)
Regards.

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• Apr 28, 2014 - 13:19

When I was using musescore 1.3 i installed a sound font: called General User GS. GeneralUser GS MuseScore v1.441.sf2

I'm not sure if musescore nightly is using it or not. How can I find out?
I have added the path to this file as the first entry in the sound font folders field of the musescore preferences dialog. As I understand this is a semicolon separated list of directories.

I get clicking whether or not /Users/jimka/Music/soundfonts is at the beginning of the sound font path list.

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• Apr 28, 2014 - 20:09

Depends on which default you mean. The default for 1.3 was a tiny soundfont called TimGM6mb; it doesn't sound very good at all. The default for 2.0 will be FluidR#, which is several times the size of GeneralUser and to my ears sounds better by approximately that same amount - or would, if it weren't for the clicks in the compressed version that is currently included with the nightly builds. Installing the full version of FLuidR3 should result in a soundfont that has no clicks and sounds better overall then GeneralUser. Although GeneralUser is not bad for its size, and I realize a couple of people prefer a couple of its instruments even over FluidR3. As a whole, though, FluidR3 blows it away, as should be expected given the size difference.

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• Feb 1, 2018 - 10:27

I've encountered this, and it's proven to be an incredible annoyance. However, I think I might have figured out what's causing it, and it's NOT related to soundfonts in any way whatsoever.

I believe that MuseScore must be glitching out when it encounters too many high dynamics at once after at least several bars' worth of music prior. I often find this strikes at its worst when writing electric guitar parts. I encountered the clicking sound in one score at one point, but when I took down some of the dynamics, it went away. Alongside that, the clicking sound, when it stays, changes volume with dynamics, so I'm beginning to think that it may be a glitch in MuseScore's playback system. Try experimenting with lowered dynamics to see if this changes anything.

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• Feb 1, 2018 - 16:51

From your description of the problem you are hearing - which indeed is probably not related to whatever was being discussed several years ago - it sounds like you might simply have the synthesizer volume too high for the soundfont you are using and it is therefore clipping (exceeding max digital volume). Try just turning that down in View / Synthesizer. There are also known problems with certain sounds (electric guitar is not one of them, but some of the bass sounds are) in 2.1 only that were not present in previous versions.

If that doesn't help, try attaching the score you are having trouble with and explaining how to reproduce the issue, and we can investigate further.

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