Start or stop playbutton behavior
Two buttons on either the main menu or the play panel control the movement through
the song. One (rewind) takes you to the beginning of the file. The other (Start or stop playback)
usually starts or stops playback. On some occasions it also takes you to the beginning of the
song. In particular if the position is already at the end of the file, the playback button takes you to the beginning.
THIS IS ALMOST NEVER WHAT YOU WANT. In the course of normal editing one may want to start
and stop playback to listen to what you wrote. Once in a while, particularly if you are editing near
the end of the song, you find yourself accidentally warped back to the beginning of the song and
this is very annoying. I've taken to adding a note in the last measure (far ahead of the actual song
end) to prevent this.
Since there is another button with the explicit purpose of going back to the beginning of the
song, I would recommend turning this behavior completely off. The playback button should
never take you to the beginning of the song. If this is not acceptable for some reason,
perhaps this behavior could be made configurable.
Comments
The piece you are playing/working on has repeats? If so, this is a known issue. If you can live without repeats, you can turn off the repeat playback and this will solve the problem. The other thing you can try is to click several times on the note you want to start playback from.
In reply to The piece you are by schepers
I just checked that even if repeats are turned off, if the music cursor is at the end of the file, clicking the Playback button restarts the song at the beginning. I think it is designed to work this way, but this is both unnecessary (since there is a separate Rewind button) and harmful (since unintential rewinds happen frequently during playback related to editing near the end of the song).
I do sometimes have to turn off repeats in order to make the playback restart at the expected location. But this is a separate issue.
In reply to I just checked that even if by bump
If you are specifically referring to how MS will rewind the playback cursor when the song is finished, this is the same behaviour in Finale. Auto-rewind may be unexpected but seems perfectly acceptable. The only other option is to do nothing as the cursor is at the end of the piece, and then other people will complain because pressing play does nothing. I don;t think thats acceptable.
The rewind button is for rewinding the cursor from anywhere else in the piece, or just making sure it is at the beginning, hence it is useful and needed.
Now, I've never experienced any issues with the cursor suddenly rewinding to the beginning when _near_ the end of the piece, and there is still notes to play. Does this happen to you? Rewinding will only happen when the remainder of the piece is rests. MS knows there's nothing else to play, and then rewinds the cursor.
In reply to If you are specifically by schepers
Granted that others prefer the existing behavior, could this behavior be configurable under preferences?
In reply to Granted that others prefer by bump
There are a number of requests to include a "playback from given bar" feature.
One is here: http://musescore.org/en/node/13679
This request is more or less the same.
After Christmas is over I will work on a formal feature request proposal for this.
In reply to There are a number of by ChurchOrganist
This issue still appears in version 1.1 and I don't see any other discussion about it. After entering some 20 pages of a score I find this to be a real pain. It does need a method of selecting where to start playing from. One is always working on the last page, which, according to an above comment, causes it to jump to the first page. Sometimes one can select a note on the current page or a measure on the current page and cause it to play from that point but most of the time it jumps to the beginning.
In reply to still in 1.1 by wingo
After working on several pieces over the last month, two of which had repeats, and experiencing this and other bugs which affect playback and the playback position, I propose the following: that the cursor position where you start the playback be the default rewind position. This means that the playback doesn't follow the cursor but instead lays down a "start" marker where the cursor will auto-rewind to when playback finishes or is interrupted.
In reply to After working on several by schepers
This is how Audacity works.
In reply to After working on several by schepers
> After working on several pieces over the last month, two of which had repeats, and experiencing this
> and other bugs which affect playback and the playback position, I propose the following: that the
> cursor position where you start the playback be the default rewind position.
This seems like an excellent suggestion. That way if someone starts playback at the beginning of the piece, you will rewind to the beginning of the piece, but if you are working on something near the end of the piece there will be no accidental rewinds to the beginning. Let me reiterate that getting unintentionally warped back to the beginning is a frequent occurrence when using Musescore to write music, at least in my experience.
Feature request now opened in the Issue Tracker:
#16180: Set playback start and end points for repeated loop playback