Tweaks to make multi-voice editing less clunky to use
Perhaps I'm going about this wrong, but working with multi-voice stuff is a bit clunky and annoying right now. A few things that would really help make it much easier to manage IMO are:
1) When you've selected a voice from the "1,2,3,4" buttons on the toolbar, clicking on the score should only ever select/edit/input notes for that voice. Under no circumstances should clicking on a note from another voice select it, unless I explicitly change to that other voice.
Currently, I always have to cross my fingers, and hope for the best when trying to insert the first note in a second voice, as more likely than not, it will either jump back to the first voice, select an existing note in the first voice, replace a note in the first voice instead, or push the first voice into the second voice. (it probably doesn't help that usually I'm trying to insert a single note or two in the second voice in the latter half of a bar only.
2) Move selected note to another voice - It would be nice to be able select some notes and switch them between different voices. For example, if you accidentally had a bunch of notes selected when clicking on the voice buttons, and now the notes have ended up in the wrong voice. Or perhaps you realised that you put things in the wrong voice (stems up vs down, etc.)
Comments
I'm not quite sure what you mean. Where and when are you clicking? Are you already in note input mode when you click? Why would you not be entering the notes left to right? Any reason not to just use the cursor keys to move about rather than clicking? Can you post a sample score and precise steps to reproduce the problem?
In general, I'm not a fan of the idea of clicking something 8ever* having the effect of not selecting it. Right now we already do this for the Select Filter and in that case it is kin of unavoidable I guess, but aside from that I think it would be very frustrating to msot users to not be able to select something just because of the state of some button or other they might have no idea is involved at all.
Regarding moving notes, that is already possible. While in "normal" (as opposed to note input) mdoe, click a note, then press the desired voice button. If there is empty space there, it gets moved. Also see Edit / Voices.
It seems you don't know all of the tricks for using voices. When you are selecting a note, that note should always be selected and voice should not matter. The only exception is if the notes are the same pitch and the stems are pointed in opposite directions, then you will probably pick voice 1. the alt-down arrow combination selects the note below the voice 1 (or other) note.
When you first enter notes in a voice besides 1, you must start on beat 1 with something, be it a rest or note. There is a way around this. If you enter a chord, you can change voices on a note that is not the first beat by pressing the voice button or ctrl-alt-# where number is a number 1 - 4 indicating the voice. There are consequences that you must be willing to deal with if you use this. First, the rest of the measure will be filled with rests in that voice. Next, If you are in voice 1 and change a later note to voice 2, everything before that in voice 1 will have its stem pointed up as though there is a voice 2 note there. You will probably want to point at least some of the stems down to make it look right. There are probably other voice combinations that have similar results, but I rarely use more than 2 voices at a time.
Marc mentioned switching voices, as I did. There is a limitation to this as well. You cannot change the voice on tied notes unless you select all measures containing any part of the tied note and exchange voices.