album component properties not transferred
Working with lyrics becomes very slow beyond 4 pages, so as suggested, I entered them in three separate scores, attached. When I combined them into an album, however, there were many problems even though all style choices were the same in all components. Unedited and edited joined scores are attached. The first component seems to be correct in the combined scores, but all kinds of adjustments in later components are not carried over to the combined score, which is very unfortunate because the point was to make adjustments as far as possible in the shorter component scores where they occur with little delay. (By the time you reach 10 pages with lyrics, things are so slow that it is very easy to make mistakes.) Not carried over were:
spacers below and above systems
adjustments to 8va lines
adjustments to first and second ending lines
changes in segment leading space and trailing space
changes in element horizontal offset
(I think changes in chord horizontal offset were carried over)
The result was that, when I had gone to considerable trouble to tighten things enough to move a bar or half-bar up a system, it was all lost and I had to copy it from the component into the combined score note by note.
Feel free to tell me that there are better ways to tighten, but reducing stretch didn't work for me. In at least one instance, tightening all relevant measures down to 10% (not 0) did nothing but reducing trailing spaces in the same measures by just 0.1sp was enough to fit them on one line. (This may not have been in an attached score.)
There are times when I would like to move a note slightly without moving an associated syllable or vice versa. I don't see how to do this. There are all sorts of ways of moving things, but other things move too. Is this laid out anywhere?
Whether related or not, I don't know, but when I tried to put a page break at the end of a 16-bar rest on p8, MuseScore closed. When I restarted it, it asked if I wanted to resume but it closed again when I said yes. I tried rebooting, etc., even starting MuseScore from the .exe file, same thing. Eventually I said No to resume and proceeded from there.
H.M.S._Pinafore.mscz H.M.S._Pinafore_II.mscz H.M.S._Pinafore_III.mscz Pinafore unedited.mscz H.M.S. Pinafore.mscz
Comments
In my experience, you'll be much better off assembing your print master in a PDF editor than trying to do it with the "Album" tool in MuseScore. Files exported as PDFs are 'locked' and do not change visually once you save them. Any and all manual adjustments you made to the mscz files will be preserved when you export to PDF.
If you don't have a PDF editor capable of combining separate PDF documents into a single, continuous file, send me a private message through the forum and if your files aren't too large to send back and forth by e-mail, I can combine them for you.
Thanks for the offer. I have used PDFCreator a lot, and of course it is the only possibility when the components have different staff spaces or other differences Album doesn't tolerate. But it means any change whatever requires the whole multi-step add-a-file process, and I am a poor mortal who often finds mistakes in his "final" assemblage. I hoped there might be a macro for that, but I suspect not.
Album allows one to correct the combined score, which is nice, although unfortunately the corrections do not get made in the components, nor do component corrections get made in the combined score without recompilation. Recompilation is easier than with PDFC, which doesn't even have the list--or would be if only it worked right. We aren't there yet, it seems.