Musescore 2.0.3 Will Not Stop Freezing
Ok, so I don't want to sound impatient, but am really becoming frustrated with Musescore right now. I'm currently working on a score due for a competition by December 2nd, and all I need to do is last minute touch up, nothing big. EXCEPT it refuses to work nearly every five seconds by giving me the rainbow wheel of death. I know my score is big and I shouldn't expect it work fast, but my computer has 16gb of ram and runs much more complex software (like Logic Pro X) quite easily. I really do love Musescore but this is really heartbreaking and stressful right now and any answers or possible remedies to the problem would be extremely appreciated.
Comments
Any chance you have the Navigator open? Try either closing it (F12) or resizing it.
In reply to Any chance you have the by jeetee
I've tried it with and without the navigator and there is hardly a difference, though I did see that that was a possible factor, thank you. The only current solution I have going is to turn off autosave, which works more or less, but is concerning due to the fact that if one of the occasional crashes occurs, I may loose progress. Are there any other known factors that might contribute to slowness?
A badly corrupted score could conceivably use a lot of CPU time rendering. We've seen this happen in a couple of cases where some issue or other resulted in thousands of spurious slurs or hairpins, all either overlapping or not appearing at all so the problem wasn't obvious at first. So that's one possible guess.
But in order to do more than guess - or help fix the score if it does indeed contain this sort of corruption - we would need you to attach the score you are having problems with.
In reply to A badly corrupted score could by Marc Sabatella
Um yeah corruption is a very perceivable possiblity...
Also, I did try to attach the score, but as I said it is unfortunately large; 13Mb or so... is there any other way to show the score? Perhaps not uploading a Musescore file but rather midi?
In reply to Um yeah corruption is a very by jrod6899
MIDI wouldn't contain nearly the same information, I can't see how that would be helpful.
The fact that your score is so large in terms of actual file size is a warning sign in itself - it would be very unusual for a normal score to ever get so large. Unless maybe it contains lots of images, in which case you could try deleting those before posting. Maybe you could upload the score to dropbox or somewhere where you have lots of storage and post a link here? I'm kind of guessing we will find it full of these spurious tags, and hopefully we can then remove them.
In reply to MIDI wouldn't contain nearly by Marc Sabatella
Yeah I figured the size was quite strange. I have no images in the score. The piece is 6:00 and is for a full concert band, so I thought it would be big, but I have previously gotten corruption messages that I fixed somehow, or at least thought I did. I just left my house for a concert, so I can't post the score by dropbox now, but I'll get back if you think that would help.
In reply to Yeah I figured the size was by jrod6899
It may indeed help - both you (allowing you to work faster) and us (allowing us to better understand the bug that caused the problem - if in fact that is what is going on). No hurry though.
BTW, if you haven't done a ton of manual adjustments to things, one possible way to "clean" the score is to export it to MusicXML and then read it back in. You'll lose some formatting info and may not like what you see, but also lost would be any of these phantom slurs and hairpins.
Still, at this point, I'm just *guessing* this is the problem. It's actually extremely rare - only a small handful of example reported. But one symptom is, when the problem appears in a score, it just steadily gets worse.
In reply to It may indeed help - both you by Marc Sabatella
Sorry to take so long on this, but if there is still interest to figure out whats wrong with my score for Musescore's sake, here a link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wz0fqu1q5pn0vi3/Mach%20Real.mscx?dl=0
I am running out of time anyway, so I don't mind if there is nothing to do, I might as well give up since I tried to do too much in too little time haha...
In reply to Sorry to take so long on by jrod6899
You have indeed been hit by a bug that generates too many slurs. Your score contains 23256 slur startpoints, but only 2016 matching end points.
Let me see if I can find the previous issue where this was discussed back. It should have a script to help cleanup your file.
In reply to You have indeed been hit by a by jeetee
Oh wow, yeah, that is a problem, thank you for checking that out...
In reply to Oh wow, yeah, that is a by jrod6899
As I couldn't find back the other posting quickly, I've done what Marc suggested. Opened your file with 2.0.3 (mscx size 13.490kB), then exported it to MusicXML (xml size 11.988kB) and then reloaded that MusicXML back into MuseScore and saving (new mscx size: 9.614kB, a decrease by 28% !)
Still quite a large score indeed. Some relayout work is likely required.
Then I saved it as mscz, which is the MuseScore native format, but compressed, resulting in the attachment (327kB).
In reply to As I couldn't find back the by jeetee
Thank you for that! I am not home to check this, but do you know if articulations were kept in playback? I tried converting to xml and it kept the physical articulations but no longer played them musically...
In reply to You have indeed been hit by a by jeetee
Here is the issue report that was filed for this when the problem was investigated previously: #138756: Unterminated slurs multiply with every save. Looks like a fix was implemented for 3.0 but not yet for 2.0.4.
By following the links in that issue, I found the following forum discussion which contains some tools for fixing scores with this problem: https://musescore.org/en/node/138061. My assumption is that running one of these tools will clean up the score and lsoe less information in the process than the MusicXML export/import.
In reply to Here is the issue report that by Marc Sabatella
Wow, these answer are extremely helpful, thank you so much! Do you mind me asking how one might run these programs? By the terminal?
In reply to Wow, these answer are by jrod6899
That would be one way, yes. One appears to be an "awk" script so you would need to have that program installed. The other is a "C" program you'd presumably have to compile first. This sort of workflow is more suited to Linux than Windows, but can be done - it's just considerably more to set up. So hopefully someone else can step in and help (my Linux machine is not up at the moment).
In reply to That would be one way, yes. by Marc Sabatella
Unfortunately, running on mac does not seem very beneficial to running either of these slur-killing programs...any helpful tips on how to use these programs or should I try to check online for answers?
In reply to Unfortunately, running on mac by jrod6899
'awk' is not available in/for macOS?
I, unfortunately, suffer through the same thing when my score starts getting big. I resort to breaking into parts that I keep around 150 measures (that's with about 40 staffs), do my modifications and copy and paste them back together.
When I break it into parts I save it as "my score part 1" and use just the "Delete" key to get rid of the notes starting around measure 150 so that the staff info and rehearsal marks are still there. Save that, open original score. Delete notes in measures 1-150 and 300 to the end and save that as "my score part 2" and so on. This makes those circles of death appear far less often.
That'll get you through it until 3.0 comes out and fixes the stupidly slow stuff in 2.0.3
In reply to I, unfortunately, suffer by mike320
Thats a very simple and useful solution! Wish I had realized that. I'll try that the next time I get the chance!
In reply to Thats a very simple and by jrod6899
You can also "stitch" the fragments back together using the album function.
I work with classical music where most pieces have more than one movement. I typeset one movement into one file, then combine them into the whole through "album".
But I have to say I have never seen anything remotely in Megabite size; I don't remember a file above 200k. My present project* (for orchestra: 5 wind, 5 brass, timpani, 5 string parts and solo cello; 390 measures, approximately 7 min.) clocks in at 135k with all details entered. (As .mscz; I suppose it would be larger as .mscx. I don't see the system working faster with .mscx at all though I expected it to be faster because the compression would use some CPU time--or so I figured).
* Not by me, by Johann Benjamin Gross.
In reply to You can also "stitch" the by azumbrunn
When I work with Romantic and later symphonies I don't even try to make them album compatible since they very often have different instrumentation from one movement to the next. Just the first movement of Mahler's 6th is over 1.5 MB here: https://musescore.com/user/6105546/scores/2843936
I would get a headache trying to match all of the different instrumentation listings Mahler put into the various movements in this symphony. Even if the instruments did line up I wouldn't even try to put it into an album because the file would never stop freezing.
In reply to When I work with Romantic and by mike320
I have never worked with anything remotely this big. In this case the best is probably to print the movements separately and combine them on paper or else export Pdfs and combine those (Even more humongous files no doubt, but little manipulation is required on them.
As to the use of album: If you combine files with album it puts section breaks between the movements. I am not 100% certain but I believe the section breaks would make the changes in instruments feasible. You'd have to make sure your style and page layout is identical throughout.
Just out of curiosity: Why did you go through the enormous labor of musescoring a Mahler symphony? As a way to study it? I am only working on music where the score (and/or the parts) is not readily available.
In reply to I have never worked with by azumbrunn
I choose the pieces I do to study them. I like to see the relationship between rhythms and chords especially found in Late Romantic and later pieces.
As far as the album is concerned. The handbook says there must be the same number of instruments and staffs and ideally with the same instruments, otherwise the names of the instruments in the first file are listed on each line. This would get confusing if you did it different. I don't mind the section breaks most of the time because most symphonies have a pause between movements. I haven't experimented with albums to know if I can alter the automatic breaks. As far as the layout style, the style from the first score is applied to the entire score.
When I want to listen to what I've done, I load one movement at a time in a score this big. If I ever wanted to print it, I would just extract parts if I wanted them and print one movement at a time. When I make the score I do my best to make part extraction rather easy as long as you make all the same instruments one part, such as all the A and B-flat (soprano) clarinets. You would end up with most of the notes on one line like in the score, but it is easy enough to figure out which note each musician plays. When it gets complicated the score separates them out onto separate lines and the same should happen in the parts once I finish all of the setup on it, which is very quick.