moved from https://musescore.org/en/node/11029
This was posted on an old thread, so I decided to start a new one, starting with a copy of the post:
Posted by bobq on March 16, 2017 - 1:51pm new
This is a very old thread. But I cannot find a way to insert/delete, and a google search lands me here, so ...
Here's why I need insert/delete instead of overwrite. Whether writing new stuff of transcribing from printed score, I don't like the "normal" way of adding notes one by one with a mouse. It takes forever. Yes, yes, I know, practice makes perfect, and I'll get faster if I keep at it. But I can already see that I'll never get as fast as the way I'm doing it now. Not if I practice for a hundred years.
How am I entering notes? I play it on a keyboard, record the midi file, and then import it in. Doing it EXTREMELY carefully, I can get most of the note durations correct. Most but not all. I change a dotted quaver to a quaver, and musescore inserts a rest. There's no way to just "pull" all the subsequent notes to the end of the song and close up the gap. I change a quaver to a crotchet, and the last note in the measure is liable to disappear. Swallowed by the immovable bar line. Copy/paste is NOT a workable substitute.
Great software. But this missing "insert mode" is a fatal flaw. It makes this wonderful program unusable.
Should it insert only to the end of the current measure or all the way to the end of the song? All the way to the end of the song, of course. Why'd you want it to only affect the current measure? If you only want that, you can just use the current overwrite mode and re-enter everything, or just insert, go to the end of the measure, and delete what you don't want to line everything up again.
If insert mode is hard to code, I suggest a simpler, easier to implement actually workable substitute. Sort of a like a "built in" macro. Have a few new buttons in the tool bar. Call the first one INS. Whatever the currently selected note duration is, pressing the INS button (or the INSERT key on the keyboard) will insert that amount of rest into the current cursor position, AND PUSH EVERYTHING to the end of the song forward. It is like "insert mode", but not really, you don't have to code this. You code it like a macro, as if the user do the "select everything from here to the end of the song", cut, add rest, paste. The user can then overwrite the rest with whatever he/she wants.
An INS-ALL-STAFFS button does the same thing, but instead of acting only on the current staff, it acts on all staffs. (maybe with the keyboard shortcut Shift-INS).
DEL and DEL-STFS buttons deletes the selected note(s), and gets rid of the gap instead of replacing them with rests.
Comments
Moving the notes after an insert all the way to the end of the song is not an option. The reason for this is that it is impossible in music and MuseScore to have a tuplet span measures. If there is any tuplet after your inserted (or deleted) note, the operation will fail and you will end up where you are now, unable to insert a note. This may not apply to your particular score, but they are so common that the majority of scores will not be able to use this feature.
As far as adding notes is concerned, using the keyboard is much faster and efficient than the mouse. All the notes are in the left hand (on an American keyboard) and all the durations are on the numeric keypad. When I enter scores, that's where my hands are. With practice I end up waiting for my computer to catch up with me when I'm on a roll.
Since I don't program in C++ (the language of MS) I can't do it, but it might be possible for someone to write a plugin that would insert and delete notes with a shift like you (and many others) want. The only thing is, it MUST fail if there is a tuplet that would end up spanning a measure. You could then assign it a shortcut. When you install a plugin it actually gives you the option of assigning the shortcut.