Any Solution for Note Entry Limitations?

• Apr 27, 2012 - 14:55

Note entry in MuseScore replaces the existing notes or rests in a measure with your new notes (i.e. overwrites rather than inserts). Also, it does not have a "switch auto-duration on/off" for notes. So, if you change a note's duration, depending on the situation it either deletes the next note or puts a rest before the next note (rather than shifting the following notes). This is a problem if you don't know exactly what the notes durations should be which is the case when you first compose a piece of music from scratch. If you are composing a piece of music from scratch it takes a lot of trail-and-error in terms of figuring out suitable notes durations.

Is there a solution for these limitations other than doing a lot of copy & pasting?

Thanks


Comments

Copy and paste *is* how you change the starting time of notes. MuseScore never assumes that just because you change the length of one note that you want to move the start time of other notes. Those are two separate actions - very often, you will want to do one without doing the other. So MuseScore does not force doing one to automatically make the other happens as well - it puts you in control over both.

Adding some sort of mode where MuseScore would attempt to guess how many notes you want to move and move them for you is a common request, and I suspect some day something like that would be added. Based on how the similar feature works in Finale though, I think people will find it is nowhere near as useful as they might imagine, since a) it is entirely likely the program will guess wrong about how many notes to move, and b) rhythms usually have be completely rewritten when their start position changes (eg, you can have a half note starting on beat three, but if you move it to the and of one, you need to rewrite it as an eighth tied to a dotted quarter). When I first moved from Finale to MuseScore, I thought I'd miss that insert mode, but it turns out it is usually simpler and more efficient to work the way MuseScore does.

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