What annoys you the most about Musescore?
For me it would it's difficult to say because there are many, but one thing that is very troublesome is the elements move around on their own. You can spend a lot of time adjusting phasing and note position, only to have all the time wasted when one note is changed in some distant place in the score. I find the Inkscape system much better. Could not entire measures or pages be grouped or un-grouped and locked into relative position so that things aren't constantly jumping around?
Comments
Elements most definitely should never move on their own. If you have some particular score where this appears to happen, we would need you to attach it and give any relevant steps to reproduce the problem in order to understand and In order to understand and assist.
In reply to Elements most definitely… by Marc Sabatella
I may not be describing elements correctly at least as they are perceived in Musescore. I perceive elements to be various elements of music notation such as bar lines, notes and the components that make up notes such as stems and flags, and their relative position to one another. Also crescendo and decrescendo markings, and lines that indicate phrasing, 1st. and 2 endings. and so forth. Attached is a score that at one time had the phrasing marked in, but I had to remove it because they phras lines moved all over the place after I made a few wrong note corrections. It wasn't the phrasing associated with the notes that I was editing, but all the phrasing lines throughout the entire score. Later I started editing the 1st and 2nd ending at the end of the piece which essentially involves a few measures at the very end of the piece. When I would change a few notes in the endings, crescendo and decrescendo markings through out the entire piece would move around. Specifically in measure 11 there is a single 1/16 note in the bass clef that i would like to lock to the 1/16th notes above it in the treble clef. You can move it and set it into position but as soon as you save it moves on it's own. Also the entire staves move around and change their own distance from each other when all I want to do is change the length of a single note stem. Musescore has always suffered from excessive automation that under certain circumstances wastes huge amounts of time.
In reply to I may not be describing… by gBouchard
None of the things you meaning should ever move of their own accord. I've loaded the score you attached but would need precise step by instructions to follow in order to investigate. Just looking at it, nothing is moving on its own.
Regarding bar 11, that note is on the bottom staff, you can't simply "move" it to another staff. You can certainly certainly use cut and paste, or cross-staff notation, but while those are possible, neither will be faster than simply entering the note onto the top staff normally. So that's really what you should be doing, not trying to force a note to appear somewhere other than where it actually is.
Not sure why you entered that note onto the bottom staff or what you are trying to do by the manual adjustments, but MuseScore assumes you want your music to be readable, so if you lengthen a stem so far that it collides with something else, it will add space to avoid the collision. If the goal was to create the illusion that the note was actually entered onto to the top staff, simply disable autoplace for that one note, by pressing "=" or using the Inspector. But, again, this note really doesn't belong on the bottom staff, better to simply enter it on the top rather than play games with manual positioning.
In reply to None of the things you… by Marc Sabatella
I'm following the original Siloti, and that's how it is notated in that score. The idea is to indicate what hand plays what notes. But I can assure you elements are moving around like crazy all the time. It's amazing to me that an expert on Musescore like yourself is always blind to the many extremely annoying short comings. The one note I pointed out is a comparatively minor issue to much of the other stuff that is going on. What needs to happen is the there needs to be a provision to lock measures and pages to insure nothing can be moved and elements need to be able to be grouped or ungrouped so that once positioned they don't slide all over the place on their own volition. I use Inkscape all the time, and while it has an initial learning curve the annoyances as compared to Musescore are minimal.
Getting back to my score, just edit some notes in the final 1st ending and watch the crescendo and decrescendo in the middle of the score slide away from their original position.
Conceptually is Musicsore a notation program or a MIDI player? Whatever it is, it's too complex for its own good.
And one more sentence about the 1/16 note. You can position it properly but as soon as you save the score it moves out of position on its own. By the way I'm using Musicsores on Kubuntu Linux.
In reply to I'm following the original… by gBouchard
MuseScore, like most programs, responds to user input, but if your input is not correct, then the result won't be correct either. because I know the program well, I don't tend to do incorrect things very often, and when I do, and see that unexpected things happen, I learn from my mistake, undo it, and perform the operation correctly. When you do correct operations, correct things happen. It really is just a matter of learning the program better. So if there is some particular operation you are trying to do that doesn't do what you expect, feel free to ask for help here (ideally, in a polite tone).
So regarding the note in question, if you attach a picture of what you want to accomplish (I have a vague idea but it isn't totally clear), we can tell you the correct way to get that result. And same with anything else where you are trying to do something and it isn't doing what you expect. if it isn't doing what you expect, then by definition, you aren't doing the proper thing to get that result, and we are happy to help show you the correct way,
Inkscape is a totally different program with a totally different purpose, apples to oranges. Or course a pure graphics program won't d intelligent things based on knowledge of music, it will force you to manually position and adjust every last symbol you want to place. If that pleases you, you are of course welcome to create your scores that way, but I guarantee it will be 10,000 times more work than having a notation program that knows how music is supposed to be engraved and handles most things for you automatically while still providing tons of manual overrides to get other results when needed.
In reply to MuseScore, like most… by Marc Sabatella
Here's the original which isn't as clear and sharp as the Musicsores. Notice too that it has a lot of suggested articulation marks, which if you try to add them to Musicsores will jump all over the place eventually if you make any edits.
And how are you able to include you pictures into the forum text?
In reply to Here's the original which… by gBouchard
Articulations don't move on their own any more than any other markings do. If they move, it is in direct response to something you are doing. So you have a specific sequence of steps that causes an articulation to move, please list the process steps, and tell us what you actually intended to make happen, and we are happy to tell you the correct way to accomplish that goal without affecting other elements.
As for the cross staff notation here, you have a few choices. Probably the best is to enter the D on the top clef staff where it actually lives, but use cross staff notation (Ctrl+Shift+Down) to move it to the bottom staff. This requires it to be added in a different voice. The other approach is to enter it as you did on the bottom staff and lengthen the stem. As I explained already, MuseScore assumes you don't want collisions by default and thus adds space between the staves, but one single keystroke disables that here. So, in your posted score, click the stem, press "=", simple as that.
However, I would point out that your manual adjustments are not good. You moved the notehead and stem separately. better to move them together, using the Chord section of the Inspector.
Normally it's not necessary to do that sort of manual adjustment at all, which is why I was questioning it. But the score you are copying is choosing to use an unusual representation of the cross-staff chord. The more common way, that wouldn't have required the manual adjustment would have had both noteheads on the same side of the stem.
To add a picture to a post, first attach the file (has to be a regular image file, not PDF) then put the cursor where you want it and press the "Insert" button next to the name of the attached file.
In reply to MuseScore, like most… by Marc Sabatella
Commenting additionally on your comment as to understanding the program well. I'm mostly familar with posting bugs related to various Linux programs. Generally when you use their bug tracking system, they want you to state what happens, and what you expect to happen. It's sort of well known by now that good software is intuitive and predictable. I can say quite honestly that if I have a completed measure composed of the Grand Staff, I do not expect the entire position of the staff to start moving around the page when I'm trying to nudge a comparatively small element's position on the staff. In most vector graphic programs I have used, elements generally have handles that show up when a certain object is selected. It is then possible to move these objects around and sometimes budge them slightly using the cursor keys. In Musicsores it's as likely as not or perhaps more likely that you will select an object and the entire score starts changing position on the page. Now this is sort of good when the measure is incomplete and additional notes are being added. The program is generally pretty good at alignment. But it's a complete nightmare when the score is almost completely finished and you've tried to do a clean job of voice assignments and so forth and you make a tiny note change and, pages away, elements have shifted and are now on top of note beams and the score becomes generally unsightly. So my expected behavior is that once a measure is complete and more music is appended and not inserted, the objects remain where they were placed in the completed measures by the end user. The title of the thread is "What bugs you the most about Musicsores," and this is one issue I find very irritating. If Inkscape acted the same way it would be maddening to try to create artwork.
Recently I received a survey asking how Musicsores could be improved. Why ask if there is no interest in improving its ease of use?
In reply to Commenting additionally on… by gBouchard
There are some things that Musescore will do by default. If I delete a measure or a line break, that four measure line usually gets filled up with tiny measures. If I add a key sig with 6 sharps, the measure is going to expand to accommodate all of those sharps. So, if you are editing a score, yes, Musescore will be making adjustments to accommodate what you have added or subtracted. things could get moved around a bit. Try putting 64 64th notes in a line, and the program is going to break at the end of that measure regardless of your choice of 4 measures per line. If it didn't do that, it would have to do something else like reduce the size of the staves and noteheads. But it's not programmed to do that.
In reply to There are some things that… by Rockhoven
I understand all that. and it's obvious that it would need to this; but I'm talking about tiny tweaks that end up causing major disruptions that actually result in massive amounts of wasted time. If you have a nearly finished composition that has complex articulations and phrasing that take a great deal of time to set, and then they all are thrown out of position once again over a minuscule note edit it's not a good thing. What I suggested is some sort of locking system where measures or pages get locked down and nothing can be moved.
In reply to I understand all that. and… by gBouchard
So once again, we cannot really help with vague complaints like this. Post a specific score and tell us what you are trying to do, specific action you attempted in an effort to achieve that result, and we will be happy to show you what action you should take instead.
In reply to Commenting additionally on… by gBouchard
What's intuitive and predictable to one person is surprising to another and vice versa. In most cases, people don't expect collisions, they expect if they move something, other things will move to accommodate it, Mostof the time this is what most people want, so it's entirely intuitive and predictable, For those rare cases where you actually deliberately want to create a collision, as with the case at hand where you are trying to overlap two stems, you simply press "=" (or use the Inspector) to disable autoplace for that element, so all other collisions are still avoided but this one is allowed. Simple, elegant, and predictable. Of course,e you won't necessarily know this is there without either reading the documentation or asking her,e but here's here pretty much 4/7, so usually we can help you solve the problems you are having within minutes.
As for the idea that things in a measure should stay fixed, this would be a complete disaster, No notation in the program could bend the laws of physics to make that possible. Consider, you have a measure with two half notes. It's maybe about an inch wide. You change your mind and decide to replace one of the half notes with eight sixteenth notes. there is no way to accommodate that without increasing the measure width, and that may indeed mean other things also need to be moved to adjust. This is exactly the advantage of a notation program over a graphics program - a notation program knows how to do this. Inkscape, as mention, is a totally different program trying to solve a totally problem, of course it doesn't know what a measure is or that it needs to be made wider if you put more notes in it. That's not its job, and that's why no one in their right mind would try to use it to create music notation for any but the smallest/simplest example (eg, two notes on a staff to use in a logo or whatever).
Anyhow, again, my time you have a specific score, a specific thing you want to accomplish, and the first thing you try turns out to be wrong, just ask here what the right way to do it is and we're happy to help.
Folks who underappreciate the hard work that goes into FREE MuseScore and this website, and instead
complain about features that are missing. I see a bunch of great music being notated with MuseScore.
I like to look for something outside of myself instead of admitting that I'm falling short.
E :)
In reply to Folks who underappreciate… by eddiewolf
Well Mark originally stated that elements should not move unwantedly. Then he asks for me to post the troublesome area. Which I do, then he says, well this note really belongs on the other clef, but that was not the intention of the original composer, and for good reason. So then he asks for a picture which I post of the original published score which I'm attempting to replicate in a more clear polished format and place into the public domain at no charge using Musescore. But now instead of addressing the issue in either the long or short term, there come accusations that I'm a whiner and don't appreciate all the hard work that has gone into the project. I actually finance this project to a small extent. Is that a way to talk to Patrons? The bottom line is things do move a lot and sometimes very unnecessarily. The program does not follow the protocols of other graphics programs because of all the automation. This has been an issue with the program for several years now. I'm not sure what changed in version 3 from version 2 because it seems very similar. I believe I got into it at the tail end of version 1.
I did find a solution, and I know others have done this from forum comments in years past. What you can do is export it as a vector graphics file which interestingly Musescore does very well. At that point you have something that is genuinely tweakable once you open it in a program like Inkscape.. I'm thinking the program should sort of deal with notation separately from the MIDI player if it's at all possible. Then again maybe the MIDI player has nothing to do with the note positions, I don't know.
What I do know is that unwanted movement of elements in a nearly completed score is highly annoying and very unproductive.