When creating individual part, name suggested does not make sense
Looking at
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/parts#setup-parts
When creating a specific part, part title: defaults to "Part" and has to be manually modified to the name of the instrument you want. It does not ask for a name when you bulk create all parts.
Question: Why does it not default to the name of the part? In what usage case / scenario would offering "Part" as a part name make sense, and not be modified?
What problem will it cause when offering the existing part name (same as what is done for bulk part creation)?
Also (slightly different topic), if there is a New All, any reason there is no Delete All?
Comments
By the time you start creating a part it hasn't an instrument assigned, so nothing to base a sensible name from.
New All is a really cool shortcut to make creating all of the parts easier. In the current version it even names duplicate instruments with numbers (Violin 1, Violin 2 etc.).
When you click New, which instrument would you like MuseScore to guess is the correct instrument? In some of my symphonic scores it has a 1 in 45 chance of guessing correctly, which is slightly better than a 2% chance of being correct. Part is something, which is better than nothing, and you're more likely to change it than not, so why not Part? It's even nice enough to number the parts as Part 1, Part 2... when there are more than one.
I've wished for Delete All a few times, but honestly when everything works right I would rarely need it, even for my 45 instrument symphonic piece. Selecting any instrument and pressing Del or Del followed by Space until they're all gone isn't bad.
Thanks guys. I should have been more clear.
Click New
Select one of the "Instruments in Score"
After picking an instrument, I still have to type in its name.
What I would expect is for it to populate the "Part title" field with the selected "Instruments in Score".. The behaviour I expect is identical to the Save As... dialog, which when you select a file from the file picker, populates that name in the file name field.
In reply to Thanks guys. I should have… by Riaan van Niekerk
As I tried to explain: at the "Click new" step the name is already filled with "Part". Instruments are added to the part after that has been given a name. And such a part can contain more than one instument (I use this on a regular base, separating the band part from the choir part), or even less (like just one voice of a certain instrument
In reply to As I tried to explain: at… by Jojo-Schmitz
Thanks, I got you 100%. What I cannot understand is why the same logic that is used to populate the "Part title:" with the part names of all parts when clicking "New All", cannot be used to populate the same "Part title:" when creating parts individually.
If it is a matter of not having the field blank, e.g. Part is a placeholder until the user selects a part from "Instruments in Score" and types a part name, why not just highlight the first part in "Instruments in Score", and populate that part's name in Part title (this is also fairly common GUI behaviour). As soon as the user selects the part they actually want, highlight it and populate it in the "Part title" field.
Also, dialog usability: When entering the parts dialog, and just pressing OK without selecting an instrument, the dialog does nothing (which makes sense since no part was selected). More common behaviour is to have OK (or Apply, if available) greyed out until the user selects one of the "Instruments in Score", which is a required field to add a score.
In reply to Thanks, I got you 100%. What… by Riaan van Niekerk
Because in the "New all" case it is known which parts to create (all) and for which instruments (one for every instrument), at the time that button is pressed. In the "New" case it is not, but still to be determenined.
So the only thing we may be able to do is, once an instrument is selected, to overwrite the name "Part" with that instrument.
Which then would annoy me a great deal, as I often use "New", change name from "Part" to "Choir" and then add the Women and Men (or SATB) 'instruments' to it.
In reply to Because in the "New all"… by Jojo-Schmitz
MuseScore could update the word part with the instrument name only if it was unchanged by the user in the first place.
In reply to MuseScore could update the… by frfancha
Sure, all possible, but that all needs to get considered.
In reply to MuseScore could update the… by frfancha
I just tested it, Changed a part name from Maracas to Shaker (score initially created in v2 which did not have Shaker), and that shows up as I would suspect in the Parts dialog under the "Instruments in Score" section as Shaker. New all creates a Shaker part. E.g. we do not need any special provisions for where the instrument name was modified (unless I don't understand you correctly).