Voices and copy/paste
I'm having difficulty getting MuseScore to copy/paste a section of a score copied from voice 2 in one of the staves. Whether I select the material manually (CTL+click, note-by-note) or using Select>More>Same Voice, either the material is not copied to the clipboard (CTL+C or right-click>Copy), or if it is, it won't paste into another staff afterwards.
Copy/paste from one staff to another is routine practise when orchestrating. Is there some sort of program limitation that prevents copying or pasting material in Voice 2, 3, or 4?
Comments
I believe you can only copy/paste a range-selection, not a list-selection. And to prevend stuff from being included use the selection filter
In reply to I believe you can only by Jojo-Schmitz
Okay, thanks. Using the selection filter (F6) makes it possible to select just Voice 2 and then copy that, and it pastes correctly afterwards. It's (obviously) not something I would have thought of without your help, though. My own workaround involved pasting the whole staff (both voices) into a scratch-pad score, then selecting voice 1 or 2 using the right-click Select function, and deleting what I didn't want before finally copying what was left and and pasting it back into the working score.
Somehow, the fact there is a distinction between 'range-selection' and 'list-selection' hadn't managed to penetrate my non-programmer consciousness until now. ;o) Just for clarification, can you define what constitutes a 'list selection'? (I presume the usual selection process--Click + -> to extend the 'blue box', or highlighting individual notes in blue with CTL+Click--creates a 'range selection'?)
In reply to Okay, thanks. Using the by Recorder485
List selection: click, Ctrl+Click..., you see the selected items being highlighted
Range selection: click, Shift+click, you see a blue rectangle
The problem here is that pasting a 'list of notes' is meaningless: imagine if you had a random, disconnected selection of notes; how would you expect the program to handle copying/pasting? It could ignore the gaps and just paste the notes in score order; it could replace the gaps with rests; it could even paste the notes in the order you selected them. Either way, this feature is ambiguous. Therefore Musescore simply doesn't support the pasting of a list of notes, only a range selection.
I guess the intrinsic issue is that Musescore cannot distinguish between a disconnected and connected selection of notes. This isn't normally necessary, because if you want a range selection, you could usually just do a range selection. I do agree though that your idea of a voice restricted range selection would be useful.
In reply to The problem here is that by Edward Buckland
Yes, that is a good description of the issue. "Voice restricted range selection" is basdically exactly what the Selection Filter does, though, unless there is some subtlte distinction I am missing?
Note we *do* support copy and paste of lsit selections in some very specific cases - lyrics, chord symbols, articulations, maybe a couple of other things. The code does it's best to attempt to figure out how to make things match as expected, but it works only in the simplest cases.