Loop in/out button shading is next to meaningless

• May 19, 2019 - 06:56

I'm using Musescore 3.0.5, Windows 7, 64b, Home Edition

In short, the "loop in position" and "loop out position" buttons on the play panel (F11) are toggle buttons, but they don't really toggle anything. I found the shaded/unshaded state of these buttons to not only be not useful, but confusing until I learned to ignore their state.

  • Load any score you want; the bug isn't sensitive to the score
  • Press F11 to get the play panel to display
  • Select a note on the score
  • Press the "loop in position" button on the play panel. The starting position flag is shown on the score, and the loop in position button on the play panel is now shaded, as the loop playback button.
  • Select a later note on the score
  • Press the "loop out position" button on the play panel. The ending position flag is shown on the score, and the loop out position button is now shaded.

So far, so good. The shading of the loop in/out toggle buttons corresponds to whether or not a start/end loop position has been set. But that is not actually what the state is modeling.

  • Press the "loop out position" button. It now toggles to be unshaded, yet the ending position flag remains unchanged, and the behavior of playback is unchanged.
  • Select a new note for the starting position, and click the "loop in button". The flag on the score moves to the same location, but the "loop in position" button shading changes to not shaded, even though the flag is set at the new position.

In fact, the loop in/out buttons can be in any of the four possible shading states and it won't affect playback behavior or display of the flags in any way after the flags are initially set.

WORKAROUND: ignore the shading of the loop in/loop out playback toggle buttons. The toggle state is next to meaningless.

Am I missing something, or is the UI just confusing?

Comments

• May 19, 2019 - 07:09

I wanted to leave my thoughts separately from the "bug report" part of my input.

The initial unshaded -> shaded transition of the loop in/out position buttons is sensible, but what behavior would I find to be the least surprising when one of the two buttons is pressed again?

  • If a new note has been selected and a loop point button is pressed again, I would expect the start/end flag to move just before/after the select note, and the loop in/out position button to remain shaded.
  • If a loop in/out button is pressed but no new note position has been selected, I'd expect the toggle to go to the unshaded state, and the corresponding in/out flag on the score to disappear.

I just realized there is another interaction that should be made consistent. If a score is opened, and the play panel is shown, and the "loop playback" button on the play panel is selected before a begin/end position marker is set, the an "in flag" is set before the first note of the score and an "out flag" is set after the last note of the score. That is completely reasonable. But neither of the loop in/out position toggle buttons are shown as shaded. It seems to me that the least surprising behavior would be if the loop in and out buttons would transition to the shaded state when pressing the "loop playback" button forces one or both of the markers to be set.

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• Nov 3, 2019 - 00:02

This behavior persists in version 3.3. It isn't a big deal, just a needless UI red herring. The shading of the loop in/out buttons reflects nothing other than whether the button has been pressed an even or odd number of times. The shading might suggest that the loop in/out location is set, but it really doesn't.

The fix is to make loop in/out just simple buttons -- press the "[" button to move the starting point to the left of the currently selected note, and press "]" to move the end point to after the currently selected note.

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