Bug reports
First, let me start by saying that version 3.1 is absolutely fantastic, what a massive step forward! I've been using MuseScore on and off but never for a large project (LilyPond guy here), but this version is really great and I am absolutely loving it. I really see myself using it for some larger projects! But I did find a couple of bugs and quirks which could be still improved in my opinion:
1) As discussed in https://musescore.org/en/node/278494, the only way apply articulations to multiple notes one must select these notes and then double-click on the articulations. This approach is fine, of course, though it might be a bit cryptic for new users to discover the double-click feature. What I find particularly anti-intuitive is that if you have a couple of notes selected and you click and drag the articulation to your selection, it will be applied only to the single note you above which you released it (or, if you released inside the selection but not above a notehead, no note gets an articulation). Why not apply articulations, lines, etc. to all notes in such case? If we make a selection and drag something to this selection, the intuitive behavior is that everything within the selection gets affected. There are some other parameters that have weird behaviors. For instance:
* select multiple notes and press 's' and a slur will cover all these notes. But select multiple notes and drag a slur from the lines palette and it applies to a single note and the one immediately after it.
* hairpins work a bit better though: dragging and releasing a hairpin above a note in a selection will extend it until the end of the bar. But using the shortcut '<' or '>' will add hairpins below the whole selection as expected.
* likewise, using articulations shortcuts with a selection (such as 'Shift+S) adds articulations to all notes.
My suggestion regarding this would be: first, apply the same behavior to drag and dropping as to the current keyboard shortcuts. Secondly, when a selection is made, drag and dropping anywhere inside the blue rectangle should apply the element to all notes instead of requiring a precise drop on a small notehead.
2) The Palettes pane is not in alphabetical order, which is good, but the order of the items in the list seem far from ideal. Why Brackets comes above much more important elements? Why are Dynamics in the bottom fourth of the list? Why are unimportant items such as breaths and pauses so high?
3) Hoovering above the lines category in the palettes pane gives a tooltip with the name of the objects. Cool, so the second and third items are called 'crescendo hairpin' and 'diminuendo hairpin'. But when I go to Edit > Preferences > Shortcuts and search for the keyword 'hairpin', I get no results. Those are called 'Add crescendo' and 'Add diminuendo'. Consistency between these would be great; in this case, 'Add crescendo hairpin' would be better.
4) From the manual, I understand that the only way to add dynamics is by click and dragging them from the palette on the left-hand side. The shortcut list does not give me any hits for 'dynamics or 'piano' or 'pp' or anything like that. Since dynamics can be edited as text, wouldn't it make sense to have a shortcut that would open a blank cursor below a selected note or below the first note within a selection of multiple notes? Perhaps the intended shortcut is 'Ctrl + E' for expression text, but the font in that shortcut does not match the dynamics font by default. Given that 'Ctrl + D' does not seem to be taken yet, why not use it to create a dynamic text with the correct font under the currently selected note/selection?
5) talking of dynamics, I understand that they can be edited just like regular text. This is great, except that the font parameters of what I type does not match the dynamics font. See:
6) It's really great that we get a miniature preview of the object we are dragging into a score as a cursor during the drag, but (at least in my computer and version 3.1) many of those seem to be broken. Below is what I see with a crescendo hairpin and with a 22a. Their top halves are cut. This happens to many other miniature cursors:
7) Perhaps it would be handy to have some vertical resistance when repositioning a dynamic or hairpin. I know that by holding Ctrl and dragging an already placed dynamic or hairpin I can move it only horizontally, but new users might not discover that so easily. A snappy (magnetic) approach could be good, so that consecutive dynamics stay within a line unless the drag is substantial in a vertical direction. They could also snap back in that position once one tries to move them closer to that position. This behavior can be toggleable, or one could use Ctrl to override it temporarily (i.e. disable the magnetic snapping).
These are just a couple of suggestions which are hopefully relevant and interesting to you all. Again, congratulations on this amazing piece of software.
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Comments
Thanks for the suggestions! For the record, none of these are bugs, more like feature requests, so in the future, that's a better place for making such suggestions.
Some comments:
Drag & drop requires a specific and compatible target to drop onto (eg, some things can only be dropped on certain elements types), which is why it doesn't work with selections in general. Double-click is more efficient anyhow.
the font for dynamics is italic so you can add words like "subito" etc. if you need to add the special characters for "p", "f", etc, use the shortcuts Ctrl+Shift+letter
In reply to Thanks for the suggestions! … by Marc Sabatella
Hi Marc, thanks for the reply!
I think that 6) is definitely a bug and 1) is a strongly inconsistent behaviour. The others are indeed closer to feature requests, I suppose. Apologies if you think this wasn't the right place to post it.
I agree that double-click is more efficient, but many people might not know about it. In my view, there is no good reason to not allow dragables to be dropped on the blue rectangle of a selection.
About the font, I see what you mean. I was not aware that Ctrl + Shift + letter would create a dynamic font.
In reply to Hi Marc, thanks for the… by gsagostinho
6) does indeed sound like a bug, you're right, I missed that one. I've never noticed that before and wonder if it's new. I'd encourage you to submit that officially using the issue tracker (see Support menu above, or Help / Report a Bug, from within MuseScore). FYI, the forum is a good place to initially ask about something you thinking might be a bug, but once confirmed, it's best to use the issue tracker.
The others things you list are indeed feature requests and best discussed in that forum. But no need to post this again. Just to keep in mind for the future. Also, best to keep threads to one subject, so just start new threads for new requests.
I wouldn't call 1) "strongly inconsistent". Again, it's just the nature of music notation that not all markings can be applied to all elements, so drag & drop needs to be selective about exactly which element you are dropping to. Some elements can only be dropped on notes, others only on clefs, others only on barlines, others only on full measures, etc. But it's certainly possible we could implement something that automatically checked each element within a selection to decide which could accept the drop and which couldn't. So this is also worth submitting officially as a "Suggestion" via the issue tracker. Basically, dropping on a valid element, if a range selection exists, could possibly do the same thing as double-click.
As for people not reading the documentation and thus not learning about double-click, there is little we can do about that. But note we do provide "tours" that pop up automatically for new users, and this is explained pretty clearly in one of those.
In reply to 6) does indeed sound like a… by Marc Sabatella
Hi Marc, I will add 6) and 1) to the issue tracker, and I will reconsider what forum to post future comments/reports/etc, apologies for posting it in bulk and in the wrong place. I do appreciate all the responses you two gave me.
But concerning what you write that there is little you can do about people not reading the documentation, I am not sure I agree with you. In my personal view, this argument can be used to defend any sort of design, good or bad. Your software does offer drag and drop after all, and it is quite puzzling that this behaves differently than when using a shortcut, regardless of whether the double-click function exists or not. My 2 cents of course, and i hope not to cause any offense with my posts here. Again, I do appreciate very much all the replies as well as the huge effort you all put into this piece of software.
In reply to Hi Marc, I will add 6) and 1… by gsagostinho
In your issue report #290057: Tooltip element names in palettes does not match shortcut names, you mentioned that some of the tool tips need fixed. I agree. Another example would be dynamics. If you want to find all dynamics with a p in it, you cannot. Searching for p only finds the dynamics that start with p, not dynamics like fp and mp. It would be better if the tool tips called them by their name, like mezzo piano and forte piano, then a search for piano (or pian) would find all dynamics with a p in them - like pianissimo.
I would suggest someone ask shoichi or claudio r from the Italian forum what he would call the dynamic pppp for example so we can give it a reasonable name.
In reply to In your issue report #290057… by mike320
If I am not wrong, ppp and pppp are normally called pianississimo and pianissississimo.
In reply to If I am not wrong, ppp and… by gsagostinho
I've heard that, but I'd like confirmation from a native speaker.
1) Agreed that there is inconsistency in how elements are applied depending on the way of applying them.
I'd like to point out however that when applying an element to a range selection (be it through double click, drag-n-drop or shortcut) it depends on the element type which action should be taken imho.
Articulations should be applied to each chord within the selection (also on rests? cfr the fermata)
Lines should be applied once, spanning the range of the selection (slurs/volta/hairpins). I believe this is a much more common case than applying a line to each selected element in the range
Dynamics Should be applied to the start of the selection. Applying it to each element within has the same musical meaning and simply causes more clutter. An argument can be had to also re-insert the previous dynamic past the end of the selection so the dynamic only affects the range selection.
Any existing dynamic within the range selection is removed.
Tempo similar to dynamics
other elements Haven't thought those through yet :)
2) Palettes are currently ordered (quite subjectively) following in which order you're most likely to need them when entering a score. Alphabetically works a bit less well with translations and would confuse those of us that regularly change languages (to provide support on this forum for example :) )
You are completely free to rearrange your palettes and their contents by creating a custom workspace. See https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/workspaces for more information
3) Agreed
4) Ctrl+E is the "Edit Element" shortcut. For text elements, it allows you type into them, for lines it allows adjusting their span and angle, for notes/chords it adjust finetuning their position.
I've noticed that dynamics is also missing from the Add → Text menu as an action. Probably because you then don't know which dynamic to add and making it a "full" list has little added value over the palette. Likely the reason why it doesn't show up in the shortcut list either.
There is ongoing work for accessibility to allow assigning shortcuts to any palette item and make the palettes keyboard traversable.
5) As Marc indicated, when editing a dynamic we don't automatically replace characters with their dynamic symbol. This allows you to type additional text instructions within the dynamic that might use those letters.
See also https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/dynamics
6) Hadn't even noticed these yet, as I don't drag-n-drop.. But yes, if there is an image preview, it should be complete.
7) Again a situation I've never found myself in. I do occasionally drag an element to a position, but then resort to the inspector to give similar elements the same position; either by selecting them and setting their offset value or (more likely) by pressing the S-set as style-button
In reply to Agreed that there is… by jeetee
Hi jeetee, thanks for the point by point reply! Some short comments about what you wrote:
1) it seems that MuseScore already takes care of that when using shortcuts. E.g., Shift+S smartly avoids adding staccati to rests, < adds a hairpin to the whole selection, etc. I think this behaviour can be consistent with drag and drop. It will surely depend on the element type as you correctly pointed out, and I suspect everything will fall into four categories: apply element to all notes and rests, apply elements to notes only, apply element to first note only, span element for whole selection.
2) I think some Dynamics and Tempo are particularly low in the list. Dynamics are certainly entered much more often in almost any type of music than any of the preceding categories.
4) Using keyboard only to input music makes engraving very fast for proficient users. I recently spoke with one of the guys behind Dorico and he was telling me that you can engrave a score without ever touching the mouse in Dorico. Sibelius also has a strong keyboard input. I think the ability to input dynamics to the current note using keyboard only would be really a nice addition.
Finally, I just want to point out that I myself don't use drag and drop either. I just tried the new version after hearing wonderful things about it and I tried to check if there was any sort of feedback I could give to you all. I contribute to other open-source projects and I am quite used to testing software, so I was basically looking for inconsistencies or things to break.
Thanks again for the reply!
In reply to Agreed that there is… by jeetee
The default order of the palette isn't really about frequency so much as order of appearance and usage. Sure, we use dynamics more than clefs, but clefs appear first in the score. And clefs, key signatures, and time signatures logically go together. Beyond that, it's unavoidably subjective, which is why allow you to customzie the order.
BTW, regarding 7) - we don't really like to encourage dragging because it is inefficient and imprecise. If you desired precision, that's what the Inspector is for (note there, also, the "Enable snap to grip" buttons) or better, double-click then use the arrow keys to move the handles.