Congratulations
I just felt the need to commend you guys on a great job, particularly for a piece of free software. I'm also impressed with the activity in these forums and the responses of the developer team.
As a novice, the thing I find that snags me all the time is the business of unwanted rests and the (probably related) issue of not being able to enter notes when I can't see why I'm not able to. Obviously there are some basic concepts about note entry that I'm not getting. It seems to be a common problem looking at the forums. Is there a concise explanation of this somewhere?
What would be nice is some sort of temporary message (not an error dialog that you have to dismiss) when something you are trying to do isn't allowed - e.g. "You can't enter a crotchet rest here because...", etc.
Well done folks.
Ross
Comments
It's hard to say without seeing a specific example of something you are trying to do that isn't working. But newcomers to notation software - or people whose previous experience is with Finale or certain other programs that work differently - do sometimes have difficulty at first understanding how Musescore works.
Best way I can describe it in big picture terms: in MuseScore, you can always enter any notes or rest you want if you first click the *position in time* whee you want that nite or rest to appear. The note or rest you enter will then *replace* whatever was previously at that position, and everything else will stay *at exactly the same time position* it was already in.
Seems simple enough when I describe it that way. The problem is that people don't seem to get the importance of the *position in time* part, and instead think in terms of *position on the page*, which isn't necessarily the same thing. Or, they get that they need to click a position in time, but them they expect that upon entering a note rest, some unspecified number of other notes or reats will magically shift left (which is to say, *later in time*) to make room for the added note or rest. That doesn't happen - again, any notes you enter replace what was already there, leaving everything else unchanged.
When you grasp this, everything becomes pretty simple..