Deleting slurs without deleting ties
Apparently MuseScore represents these internally as the same object type - "SlurSegment" - so that right clicking a slur and choosing "Select->All Similar Elements" also selects all ties. Meaning I cannot use this method to clear all slurs from a region without also deleting all ties.
Can anyone think of a way to accomplish that? I'm trying to adapt a score from winds to strings, and I would like to quickly clear out all slurs, and then possibly add in phrase markings that make more sense for strings. So far, I've been removing the slurs one by one, but there are a *lot* of them.
[ I just realized that since the particular score I am working on came from Finale via MusicXML, I can go back to Finale and delete all slurs before exporting. So, my immediate problem is solved. Still, would be nice to be able to do this within MuseScore as well. ]
Comments
I couldn't find a way to do it directly in MuseScore but I did find a workaround if you are given such a file and only use MuseScore:
Save the file in MuseScore format (not the default Compressed MuseScore format).
Open it in a text editor.
Search for "slur". Somewhere near the beginning of the file you will see lines such as:
Slur id ="1"
/Slur
Slur id ="2"
/Slur
Slur id ="3"
/Slur
Slur id ="4"
/Slur
Delete those lines.
Save the file.
When you open in again in MuseScore the slurs have gone but the ties remain.
In reply to Delete slurs by underquark
Very cool, thanks! I hadn't actually looked at the MSCX file but assumed the slur statements would be scattered through the file and thus lots of work to manually delete - and that they are, but the declarations of those slurs are all collected at the top. Not bad at all!
Turns out it wasn't so easy to delete all slurs in Finale, either - the command I thought was doing it was only doing it a page at a time.
In reply to Very cool, thanks! I hadn't by Marc Sabatella
I noticed in MusicXML files there are only really two sets of statements (relating to slur Start and slur End) so a couple of simple Search and Replaces did the trick. In MSCX format, though, the statements for each slur are numbered sequentially which would make a Search and Replace more difficult. Kill the declarations, though, and you remove the reference to the slurs in question. A bit cheap and dirty from a Coder's point of view since it leaves the original statements behind.
I wasn't sure what would happen if I added a "real" slur subsequently but it seemed to work OK and MuseScore tidies up the coding, too. If it is a problem then you can try Save as MusicXML format, locate the 'Slur...Start...Number "1".../Slur' and 'Slur...End...Number "1".../Slur' phrases and Replace them all with nothing.