number of measures
In Musescore, there was a feature in the General settings that you could use to set a number of measures per system. I really liked this feature.
In Musescore 2, the feature is missing, and when I searched the topic, I was told to use Page Settings to do this. But when you use this feature it makes the music a bigger height wise as well as length wise.
All I want to be able to do is to Make it so I have only four measures in one System, not make the music huge.
thanks,
B
Comments
You should be able to control the height by using the Style | General | Page features Min. System Distance and Max. System distance.
But your point remains valid. The Musescore 2 way of doing what you want is much less obvious for the end-user. The old system was certainly easier to understand. Futhermore, the cumbersome new system also causes the problem I draw attention to in this thread .
In reply to You should be able to control by Ironword
I think you mighty be misunderstanding. The current way of doing this is Edit / Tools / Add/Remove Line Breaks. It is in all respects superior to the old method. Apparently you have been trying to use stretch or some sort of page setting for this purpsoe, but that's not a new system - that's just a totally different thing you can also do. And it is not changed form previous versions. The only change was getting rid of the one-size-fits-all option to force all systems to brea after the same numebr of measures and replace it with the one I mentioned, which gives more control but takes the exact same numebr of clicks to produce the same result as before.
In reply to I think you mighty be by Marc Sabatella
Marc, you are correct that it doesn't take any more clicks to accomplish the same thing as it did in 1.3; however in 1.3 that control was in a 'logical' place--the Style>General>Systems dialogue--whereas in 2.0 it is buried under a couple of rather non-intuitive menu titles. I went looking for it myself yesterday evening and could not find it after fifteen minutes of searching; but when I opened 1.3 (which I haven't run since 2.0 came out, so I have forgotten a lot of the details), I found that control on the first try. It was right where I thought it should be.
I think the problem is a combination of nomenclature and location. First, Edit>Tools implies that the resulting menu will offer the user the opportunity to edit the functioning of some tools offered by the program. In other words, it's not a particularly 'user-friendly' item title; few users feel competent to edit a program's tools, so most won't ever open that menu to see what it contains. It's like those buttons in OS dialogue panels which say 'Advanced Options'. 85%-95% of users won't ever click on them (and 75% of those who do won't understand what the new dialogue offers). To make this whole 'tools' submenu more accessible and logical, it would be better to move it up one level and create a new Tools item in the main menu .
Secondly, Add/Remove Line Breaks sounds vaguely like an alternate to dragging a line-break from the Breaks & Spacers palette menu. But adding a manual line break to improve page make-up is normally a one-line-at-a-time function so why would I want to go to the extra trouble of addressing it through a menu instead of using the palette? And if I need to remove all the line breaks I've added because I don't like what they've done to the make-up, I can do that easily enough from the context menu. So the name of the actual 'Add/Remove Line Breaks' dialogue is also misleading; I think it would be better called 'Set System Length'. Yes, this dialogue does add or remove line breaks, but it does so globally and pretty much solely for the purpose of controlling the length of systems. And to make this more accessible and logical, I would suggest it be put back in the Style>General>System dialogue.
In reply to Marc, you are correct that it by Recorder485
It's not really good to have it a style setting; that's why it was removed. A style setting doesn't allow for the possibility of different numbers of measures in different places in the score (eg, the pickup making a fifth measure on the first system, or voltas being combined onto one system even though it's an extra measure or two. That's why it cannot possibly be moved back threre, either - it is not and should not be a global score-wdie setting. That's far too limiting.
No doubt, Edit / Tools can be better exposed; this is already happening for 3.0 (a top-level Tools menu). But that's a seoparate issue - the *discoverability* of a feature versus the *usability* or *functionality* of it.
"Set System Length" is not accurate. The function does not force *more* measures to fit than would otherwise fit; it simply puts a cap on the number of measures. So you can't ask for 87 measures per system - not in 1.3, not in 2.0.3.
In reply to It's not really good to have by Marc Sabatella
Per discoverability, it's currently like this in the nightly builds:
In reply to Per discoverability, it's by Isaac Weiss
@Zack--Curious; "Format" appears to replace "Style" (I like that new name; it's more indicative), but that's where the score-wide controls are placed, as Marc pointed out. It seems that it would be more logical to put this function in the new "Tools" menu, along with any other fuctions which are not (necessarily) score-wide.
In reply to It's not really good to have by Marc Sabatella
@ Marc: Thanks for the correction on that not being a global function. However, it is easy to make that error, as it appears to be a score-wide control because if the user does not select a section of a score prior to opening that dialogue, the tool automatically selects the entire score. This is different than many other non-global functions; if nothing is selected before attemting to call one of those, the user either gets no response, or he gets that 'no note or rest selected; please select...' popup reminder.
On that basis, I understand the logic for putting it in a 'tools' menu, so it's good to hear that Tools will become a top-level menu item. I think that will greatly aid in the discoverabiity of more than just this function.
As for a better title for this function, do you like 'Limit System Length' better?
In reply to @ Marc: Thanks for the by Recorder485
"...it appears to be a score-wide control because if the user does not select a section of a score prior to opening that dialogue, the tool automatically selects the entire score."
No different from Reset Stretch, Reset Beams, or Transpose. And no, I don't like that title—"length" is very much the wrong idea.
In reply to "...it appears to be a by Isaac Weiss
How about 'Limit Measures per System' ?
In reply to How about 'Limit Measures per by Recorder485
How about "Add/Remove Line Breaks"? ;-)
In reply to How about 'Limit Measures per by Recorder485
"Limit measures per system" makes it sounds like it works by some sort of magic. It isn't magic - all it does is insert line breaks, just like it says. I think obscuring that basic fact does users a disservice, esxpecially ones who *do* understand how it is supposed to work and will now have difficulty finding it because they are looking for a command that allows them to do what they have become accustomed to with all the flexibility they have been enjoying.
Basically, I don't think it's broken except for Tools being hard to find in 2.0.3 and that's already fixed. The command is perfectly descriptive of what it does.
In reply to "Limit measures per system" by Marc Sabatella
I agree, though note that this "tool" has been moved to the Format menu—see screenshot above.
In reply to I agree, though note that by Isaac Weiss
Oops, noted. Indeed, a good place for it.
In reply to "Limit measures per system" by Marc Sabatella
With all due respect, the command title may be perfectly descriptive of what it does to you and others who work with programming logic and jargon on a regular basis; but as a user I do not find it so, and that is the perspective I am trying to bring to this issue. Imagine calling a crosscut saw a "Remove wood fibres" tool, or a hair-dryer a "Remove excess capillary moisture" tool. What a tool accomplishes--not how it does that--is the essential element in naming the tool. I am not a code expert, but I am a very good technical writer, and that is an essential skill in designing any user interface.
It is a known problem that the people who are actually competent to do UI design are so familiar with the logic and jargon used in programming that they lose sight of how non-programmers think. The number of users
is far inferior to the number of users who don't understand the underlying basis as well as you do.
No offense intended. I'm only trying to help by bringing the user point of view to the fore.
In reply to With all due respect, the by Recorder485
I really doubt there's anybody who doesn't get the concept of a line break.
In reply to With all due respect, the by Recorder485
I don't see what "programming logic and jargon" has to do with it. It's called a break in the palette, it's called a line break in every word processor I've used. It's not about programming jargon at all - it/s about levergaing the correct term that surely most users are already very familiar with. Most users probably know about the Breaks palette, virtually all users have used a word processor before.
In reply to I think you mighty be by Marc Sabatella
As Recorder noted, this got buried in an unintuitive place...no wonder I thought you'd instituted a new system. Glad to see it's already corrected in beta.
In reply to As Recorder noted, this got by Ironword
Thanks for your kind words of support, but I have given up trying to persuade the powers that be that the name of this command is as non-intuitive as its current placement in the UI. I am as pleased as you are that the placement has been corrected for the next version, but I probably should have remembered the old saying, "You can lead a horse to water, but if you try to make him drink, you'll just annoy the heck out of him." I have no interest in annoying anyone, so I'll just drop out of this discussion.
;o|