Problems of selecting items
I recently got my knuckles rapped for describing the user interface in MuseScore as 'dreadful'. I was advised to make specific posts about specific issues. I have no desire to duplicate points that have already been made by others, but the number of posts on the site and the mass of results one now gets from even complex sets of search terms mean it is difficult not to say things that have been said before. With this caveat in mind...
Not possible to select a subset of notes in a chord, only a single note within a chord. Shift-clicking on individual notes within a chord should permit selection of a subset; at present if you shift click more than one note the whole chord is selected.
Not possible to select all the notes within a bar without invoking ‘select bar’. It’s desirable to select notation items as notes without the bar select rectangle appearing.
Over long stretches of a score, selection of a stretch of music by clicking on the first note and shift-clicking the last one is near impossible. This works satisfactorily within a page, but between pages, the first selected note is usually lost by the time the last one has been located. Only the navigator can be used to pan between pages and keep a note selected, yet the navigator view can’t be zoomed and it’s often difficult to find a specific point in a complex score.
Shift-dragging to select items while dragging moves the visible area is the opposite of the way selecting and window moving is done in most other software of my acquaintance.
Comments
1/ You can select multiple notes with Ctrl + Clic. Shift click will select a range of only this chord.
2/ Indeed it's not possible to select the notes in a measure without the blue box. Why would it be desirable? Can you make a UI/UX proposition?
3/ You can navigate through pages with PageUp and PageDown or with Scroll (vertically) and shift + Scroll (horizontally). On a mac you can just scroll horizontally. I guess a panoramic view will solve this issue.
4/ Are these software music notation software? Any specific example?
In reply to 1/ You can select multiple by [DELETED] 5
1. Had never come across Ctrl+Click in the manual or any answer before. Indeed, it does what I'm after, and Ctrl+Shift plus drag turns out to be the selection tool I've been missing all along. Thanks you! Please note that in most software with graphical content, dragging a box around a desired area selects just that area. MuseScore is quite different. It's important for MuseScore documentation to stress the different forms of select (Shift+click, Ctrl+click, Shift+drag, Ctrl+Shift+drag.
2. Operations affecting notes are different from operations affecting measures. If only the note heads light up when a bunch of notes is selected, it's more intuitively obvious that you're working with notes. Once the rectabgle appears one's instinct is to think - darn, I didn't mean to select a bar.
3. Fine. And if the arrow keys did to the page what they do in most graphically based software that would be even better.
4. I don't understand the point. But I have access only to MuseScore (learning one notation package is enough!)
In reply to 1/ You can select multiple by [DELETED] 5
Just five minutes after the above post I ran into a spectacular example of my complaint no. 2. Have uploaded the pic. Here I selected only the tied high notes and the note heads are indeed highlighted, but the blue rectangle immediately suggests I've made a mistake and selected the bar/measure instead. Imagine how you'd react in a program like word if you selected a few words and a rectangle appeared surrounding the line below!
In reply to 1/ You can select multiple by [DELETED] 5
Regarding 2:
Say I have two lines, Line 1 and Line 2, I want to put them in a single line as two voices. I copy Line 1 over to the new line. Then I select Line 2 and make it all in voice 2. I don't know what the next step is in musescore. If I copy the voice 2 measures into the new line, it overwrites everything because I've selected measures and not just notes. In Sibelius 2, I would be able to filter my selection of Line 2 to just notes and copy that onto the new line without overwriting anything. So this is a legitimate need, and my UI/UX proposition is to copy Sibelius. Or am I missing something?
#9861: Drag-selecting partial chord shouldn't highlight individual notes
#10662: [Trunk] Not all selected notes moved upon drag move
Ctrl-click is a standard Wndows shortcut for selecting discontiguous items; I assume Mac and Linux have something similar. That's also how you'd select just individual notes in a range of chords, as you subsequent example suggests you were trying to do.
I think overall it is probably best to keep in mind that there is distinction to be made between notes and chords in that certain operations by definition can only affect whole chords, not individual notes. For example, changing duration always affects a whole chird, since standard music notation does not allow for different note lengths to be combined in the same voice. So It seems there is limited support for selecting individual notes as opposed to selecting chords in MuseScore, and I guess this is your main complaint. If it's any consolation, MuseScore is still *miles* ahead of Finale in this regard, which really doesn't support these types of operations *at all*. You basically can't select discontiguous notes or chords period, and there are very few operations you can perform even on contiguous regions. Sibelius is better than Finale in this regard, but is virtually identical to MuseScore. In fact, a lot of MuseScore's UI is based on Sibelius' use model, which isn't a bad choice, since it is the most popular notation program in the world, and its main claim to fame over Finale is a reputation for better usability.
As I think you'll find if you start investigating other notation programs, there are a lot of complications that probably would never have occured to you if you're basing your expectations on how things work in simpler application like word processors or even desktop publishing programs. Some of this is inherent in the nature of music as not just a set of meaningless objects, but symbols with specific meanings. This can often make certain operations that would be meaningful in a purely graphic program meaningless in a musical context (like changing duration of just certain notes within a chord). This cuts both ways - sometimes there are things that you'd think would be easy but turn out to be hard, but other times, there are things that would be impossible in a purely graphic application but are easy in a notation program.
But still, sure, shift click to select a contiguous range of notes within a chord rather than needing ctrl-click would be a potential improvement that could save a click every once in a while. And I would agree there should be no need for the blue rectangle when selecting notes only (not that it does any harm, either). I'd just note that both of these behaviors are better than Fimale, and exactly the same as Sibelius. Being the same as Sibelius means it will be instantly familiar to a lot of people. And even among users not already familiar with Sibelius, Sibelius' reputation as the #1 notation in the world from a usability standpoint is not to be taken lightly - choices they made are at least worth considering and not writing off as "truly dreadful". But here, again, I would agree that these two specific small enhancements would be nice. Very minor in impact, but nice nonetheless.
I still think it would be more useful to start separate threads with your various suggestions, though.
In particular, if you have *specific* suggestions as to make selection of large ranges (spanning multiple pages) easier, I'm sure that would be helpful. I agree this can be difficult, but then, it's difficult for exactly the same reasons in every program of any kind I've ever used. To me, the best solution is better keyboard navigation control - that's how I'd normally do this in Word, for instance. I know there has been talk about adding scroll bars to the upcoming version 2.0 of MuseScore, which will probably help. Along with that, a scroll view like Finale would make this sort of navigation more staightforward. The use of scroll view is probably why you remember your brief experience with Finale as having less "jumping around" than MuseScore, because that sort of jumping around is pretty much inherent in the page view style used in both MuseScore and Sibelius. If you have other ideas, feel free to share - but again, pronably best to keep it to one topic per thread.
BTW, as for click versus shift-click for navigation versus selection, I would say I initially felt the same way, but I have come to realize that I navigate about 100 times as often as I select, so reverting to the opposite way of doing it would be a huge step backwards in usability. It would be interesting to compare with how other programs that deal with objects on a canvas deal with this. Again, it's exactly the same in Sibelius, which is always worth something. Finale, on the other hand, uses scroll bars rather than dragging as its primary navigation method (you can also drag by right click), so a simple click-drag would be all you need is all you need to select - except that doesn't work unless you are in one of Finale's special selection modes. Overall, navigation is one of the areas in which Sibelius is generally considered to be ahead of Finale, except for scroll view, which I still miss in MuseScore (as I would in Sibelius). There might well be a better way to do navigation while in the "page view" mode that MuseScore and Sibelius employ, and I,d still encourage you to make suggestions (ideally in a thread devoted to that topic only), but again, simply swapping the behaviors of click and shift-drag would actually be a step backwards, I think, as it would mean *way* more keypresses than the current interface.
If I have not misunderstood you need this?
http://musescore.org/en/node/12345
In reply to @someperson by Shoichi
Yes, thank you! It's unfortunate that that page doesn't show up in Google when I try describing the problem.
First of all, there is no "Measure" under Create, as said in the User Guide. One has to append measures by going to Create -> Bar -> Append Measure
But most importantly, the User Guide lacks instructions on how to *select*! How does one for example select a measure? Does one have to be in note entry mode, or not? And is it just a click or a something-click?
In reply to Documentation by guustnolet
I think "measure" is translated differently depending on your language settings. For North America there certainly is a Measure item under the Create menu. "Bar" is used elsewhere.
To select a measure you must be out of note entry mode and just single-click in blank space in the measure. In note entry mode you are entering notes only.
In reply to Documentation by guustnolet
Several ways of selecting things in MuseScore aside from clicking ; most use standard OS shortcuts. For example, on Windows:
- click first note, shift-right-arrow to extend selection one note at a time
- click note, shift-click last note
- click note, shift-end to select to end of line
- click note, shift-ctrl-end to select to end of score
etc
You can also select with the mouse via shift-drag as explained previously in this thread.