New shortcut to add tied notes to a previously tied chord

In my opinion the current behavior comes in handy if there is just a tie missing. That is, if the second note already exists. Select the first note and press +, voila. You don't have to worry about duration of the existing subsequent note.

You can enter 5, c, +, right, 4 to get the desired result.

MS does not know if the duration got changed just before the tie or earlier. Both commands are not linked together. The duration will just be ignored if there already exists a note behind the tie.

You are right, my suggestion does not work in MS 2.1.3. I checked with MuseScore 3.0dev.
Instead you can press 5, c, +, q

This is by design. See https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/2179#issuecomment-135482602.

so let's mark as such?

Yes, it is

As the person who designed this behavior, I can say it is by design, but I can also agree there is room for improvement in the design. The trick is in differentiating the cases where this is expected form those where it isn't. BTW, "undo" has nothing to do with the normal processing of note input commands, the code processing a given command has no idea which commands preceded it.

I think tobik was mistaken about the behavior being different between version 2 and version 3. I tried his original suggestion with version 3, and I got the same result as with version 2. The design has not changed between versions. Possibly he had left note input mode before creating the tie the first time.

This does not seem to me like a very common thing to want to do. I do not see any need for MuseScore to remember that the last thing the user did was to select a duration. Whether or not a command takes the selected duration into account should not depend on how or why or when the duration was selected.

mtmcclinch is totaly right. I rechecked the behaviour in 3.0-dev again and it is the same as in 2.3.2. He is even right in that I have to left input mode to get my described behaviour.

I agree. Since it makes no sense to turn this into a chord, ignoring the duration makes less sense.

I don't agree. When a subsequent note already exists it is most probably desired to tie the existing note without changing it's duration.

I understand that you set the duration immediatly before the tie. But is it worth changing the whole logic for this rare case?

You don't have to delete, just change. I told you how.

This result is inconsistent with the rest of MuseScore. If you had two quarter notes, selected the first and pressed the . you would get the same rhythm frfancha expects from adding a tie to it. You would get the same thing if you had a 1/4 rest followed by 1/4 note and added a dotted 1/4 note on the rest. Why should adding a tie be any different?

Adding a . is a bad example. It's only purpose is changing durations. Adding a tie is different.

For the reasons explained (and illustrated with examples) in the post linked above - it is exactly what you expecting when adding to a chord. On the other hand, changing the behavior of the tie button to pay attention not just to the current state of things but to also somehow track the history of what lead to this state - while techically possible, that would be inconsistent, not to mention a much bigger change just for this one corner case. Which, btw, might not even always be the desired behavior - what if you were thinking, I want to change the duration of this note, maybe turn it into half note, no, scratch that, maybe into a dotted quarter, hmm, - no wait, I see there is already a note of the same pitch just to the right, I'll just tie to that. Which today works, but wouldn't if we started second guessing thing like this.

So I will say again - I can agree there might be specific cases where the current logic isn't ideal. Let's look at how to identify those cases for what they are, not how we might be able to guess intent by looking at the user's past history.

Examples of ways to distinguish the cases that don't rely on maintain addition state about the past:

• is the note being tied from part of a chord of multiple notes?
• is the note being tied to part of a chord of multiple notes?
• are there other ties from the current chord?
• are there other ties from the next chord?

etc.

In the current implementation, when a tie is added where there is an existing chord, MuseScore performs an action that can be described as "Add new tied note to existing chord". This is a very useful action, but it is not always the one that the user would like to perform. I propose that we separate this action from the regular tie function, and give it its own shortcut. Maybe Alt+, since Shift+ wouldn't work and Ctrl+ is taken.

@matt,
Great idea. Entering scores, either option is possible.

See https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/4232.

Fixed in branch master, commit adc9c59bf0

fix #278752: Add tied note by keyboard fails when notes are already present

Fixed in branch master, commit b43fad096f

Merge pull request #4232 from mattmcclinch/278752-chord-tie

fix #278752: Add tied note by keyboard fails when notes are already present

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

Just to summarise. A new shortcut, [Alt] [+] has been added to allow users to add more tied notes to an existing tied chord. For example:

Select any of the notes in the first chord in note input mode, and apply [Alt] [+]: