Ties and phrase markings altered upon reopening
I'm a very new user to MuseScore and have found it intuitive to use.
I've been going to town on a new piece for piano. I've been routinely working on the piece for the last few days and saving it regularly. Yesterday was the first day in which I actually closed the file completely.
This morning when I opened it up, I noticed that a number of things had changed in the score. 1) All my phrase markings were gone, and in some of the places were now random slurs between notes; 2) In areas where I used a second voice but deleted the rests to make it look cleaner, all the rests had reappeared; and 3) it's in 6/8, and almost everywhere I had used a dotted-quarter, it's now been changed to an eighth-note tied to a quarter, or variations of that.
I'm wondering if there is a bug here? Thanks very much.
Comments
Welcome aboard, could you attach the problematic score here?
use the "File attachments" option at the bottom of the page, just above the Save and Preview buttons when you're typing your post and specify the operating system and version of MuseScore in use.
In reply to Welcome aboard, could you by Shoichi
Thanks for looking at it.
This piece originally had no empty measures at the beginning but I wanted to add an intro so I added a few measures. I'm wondering if this is when all the problems happened. When I deleted all the measures then everything on pages one and two that was in the bass clef moved to the treble!
This is getting pretty annoying. I'm considering not using this software with the amount of issues that I"m having with it.
OS X El Capitan 10.11.5
MuseScore 2.0.3
In reply to Thanks for looking at it. by Darryl Cremasco
I'm sorry you have been having issues. Be sure to ask for help with them on this forum - chances are they are simple misunderstandings easily corrected once people here show you how to do things correctly.
Inserting or deleting measures should not in itself change clefs, but if there was a clef change in the middle of the measures you deleted, then indeed, the results after the deletion might possibly be affected, as should be expected. And since your score *does* contain a clegf change (from bass to treble in the bottom staff, right at the start of the piece), I can guess this is what happened. Hard to say without precise step by step instructions to reproduce the problem you were seeing. But in any case, it is easy enough to add a clef chance back, just drag a clef from the palette. I'm guessing you meant for it to change in measure 14.
As for the original problem with dotted notes turning into ties, this doesn't happen all by itself - it's the result of some operation that forces MuseScore to rewrite the contents of measures. There are a few things that can do this, including copy and paste if the destination doesn't have its barlines in the same relative places as the source (eg, you try pasting a passage that started on beat 2 of one measure onto beat 3 of another), also it could happen if you delete a passage that includes a time signature change. Without know exactly what you did, it's hard to say, but that's my best guess - it was the unavoidable consequence of something you did involving either copy and paste or deletion with a time signature change involved.
As it is, I see only a handful of places where there are ties that should be dotted notes, so it should take only a couple of minutes to fix.
EDIT: closer examination of your score suggests it might have been started with a much older version of MuseScore - like 1.something? The tipoff is a bunch of chord symbol information at the top of the file (when I look at the MSCX file within the MACZ archive using a text editor) that would not normally be present in scores created using MuseScore 2. That shouldn't in itself be a problem, but it is certainly possible some sort of corruption was already present in the score from that earlier version before you began working on it in 2.0.3.
In reply to I'm sorry you have been by Marc Sabatella
Thank you. It must be the good old learning curve. I'm happy to see that there is a supportive community here :-)
What may have happened was, because I wanted to find a way to create an introduction that was free metered I fooled around with creating a measure that was technically in 4/4 but actually had like 32 beats in it. I hid the time signature and was starting to hide some of the rests. It's possible I did delete measures in the new time signature but when I noticed the problems in the rest of the score thought it was due to a glitch. Is there an easier way to do it? I'm trying to give it a modern intro where the performer has some freedom in when they play things before we head into the the 6/8 part.
I did correct everything, it wasn't a huge problem. And will keep an eye on anything I might do that causes this issues. It's good to know this isn't some random thing and hopefully I'll be able to avoid it down the road. Fingers crossed.
Thanks.
In reply to Thank you. It must be the by Darryl Cremasco
Yes, it sounds like it was in your experimentation that the problem occurred. Without knowing exactly what you were trying to do, it's hard to suggest how exactly to accomplish it, but if you want to create a measure that is notated 4/4 but has 32 beats, you shoud create 8 bars of 4/4 then select them and use Edit / Measure / Join Selected Measures. But before even setting up that 4/4 section, make sure you protect the existing 6/8 music by putting an explicit change to 6/8 before it (even though it's already 6/8 at that point. Otherwise, when you place the 4/4 at the beginning of the score, it will rewrite all the measures to the end, and this is almost certainly what happened to you. You need to make the change to 4/4 without affecting the rest of your piece. Another method is to add more 6/8 measures in front, then select them before double clicking the 4/4 in the palette - this automatically sets the selected measures to 4/4 and restores the 6/8 at the end.
In reply to I'm sorry you have been by Marc Sabatella
Yes, you are correct. Good observation. If this happens again, and say that was where the corruption began, would it make sense to manually reenter all the music in a new file in 2.0.3?
In reply to Yes, you are correct. Good by Darryl Cremasco
Probably there was no problem with the fact that it came from 1.3. I was just trying to guess at possible causes. But knowing now what you were doing with the introduction, it seems pretty clear that it was in your experiments there that you inadvertently caused the rewrite.
As for avoiding it in the future, just be sure not to introduce time signature changes in front of passages of music you have already entered ubnless you *want* that music rewritten. if you don't, you need to protect the music from rewrite by making sure your time signature stops in time. Also, remember Undo is your friend, if you pay attention to what you are doing and spot the problem right away.
It's possible you accidentally saved different copies of the score to different folders. It's also possible you accidentally opened the backup copy of your score that MuseScore creates automatically (although this should be hidden by default, and the filenmae is changed to end in a comma so it won't open automatically as a hint you are looking at the wrong file).
It's also possible you tried exporting your score to MIDI and then imported that file rather than actually loading the score itself (which should be of type MSCZ).