User control of "secret" per-score parameters, viz., articulation gate-time
MuseScore has all sorts of per-score, or even per-part, parameters encoded in the .msc(x/z) not available through the UI. Whoever made them per-score or per-part instead of hard-baked constants in the code clearly wanted them to be able to differ. Editing XML files to customize scores should never be necessary.
In particular, the "gate time" of articulations: portato, staccato, etc. can be edited to great advantage; I have made a science out of editing "portato gate time" to numbers between 70 and 95% (default is 67%), allowing this rare ornament to be used liberally as effective phrasing (and subsequently hidden) (https://musescore.com/user/1831606/scores/4978661 ) in a wide variety of very well-sounding scores. Sure, I'd like to have control of note articulation in the inspector, but this methodology works surprisingly well (and arguably even more efficiently).
The only flaw is required .mscx editing; Editing large XML files to customize scores should never be necessary. Hidden settings should be exposed.
Comments
Agreed. In principle, it's easy to add control for individual articulations to the Inspector, and to allow articulations thus customized to be added to custom palettes. Rather more involved would be a full-flegded editor for the defaults.
In reply to Agreed. In principle, it's… by Marc Sabatella
How about a half-fledged editor? I suppose you can select all "similar and same subtype" and set the gate time in the inspector control you seem to think easy, although that would require doing that (at least repeating the number) every time an articulation was dropped in. At this point, I'd rather have a half-fledged editor. I'm trying to think where other per-score parameters (other than titles, etc) are set, but it's not coming to mind. Individual control would be great, even more so if control over the default were possible.
(This situation already obtains for "Baroque" ornaments: you have to set every single one every time you place it to "Baroque", and you can easily change all those you have already placed, but there is no way to set the default for ones you haven't placed yet, and this remains very annoying and error-prone).
In reply to How about a half-fledged… by [DELETED] 1831606
Right, the Inspector control is easy to implement (I think it would be, anyhow) but not as good a an editor for the defaults. That could presumably be provided in the Style menu, with overrides in Staff Properties (since it is indeed implemented internally in terms of global defaults but also per-instrument overrides).
Here's another use I've found, and something that could be much better. The cello (seemingly both sound fonts) seems to be played "detaché". To get a smooth run of notes, I used to use the piano-roll "editor" to assign gate times of 1100 (out of 1000). (If you leave it at 1000, that's an adequate phrase break). In this composition yesterday https://musescore.com/user/1831606/scores/5159652 , though, what I did was to appropriate the "tenuto" articulation, and change the .mscx to give it a gate time of 1100 ("piano-roll" talk, 110 ".mscx gate-time" talk, and apply it to every note of the composition, selectively removing it for phrasing, then mass hiding. There should be a better way to do adjust the default gate-time of instruments; I note that some instruments already seem to have "default off times" other than 1000 in the Piano-roll editor. As you can here, the phrased line is very credible.
The bug can't be fixed in the sound-font because all previous hand-adjusted (i.e., by piano roll) scores would break. But XML editing to express music is a sure sign that something is missing.