Anacrusis spacing issue when saving

• May 3, 2013 - 13:13

I have a 6/8 piece which starts with a quaver upbeat, and ends with a 5 quaver bar, as is convention. The piece is divided into two sections, which each begin and end the same way. Each section fills a page. I have used stretching and spacing to put the upbeat to the second section on the second page , leaving the first section's 5-quaver bar on the first page.

The issue happens when i try to save it. The 5-quaver bar and the following 1-quaver bar end up both on the first page when I reopen the file.

Any ideas on how to solve this? Sibelius has a fairly good system and page break system, although I like the simplicity of increasing/decreasing stretch in Musescore. Can I insert a page break between the two incomplete bars?

Thanks in advance!


Comments

If you want things to remain exactly in the positions or pages where they are, use line breaks and page breaks. Otherwise, sometimes they will move without them.

In reply to by twiddly bits

Worked fine for me to add the page break, save, and reopen - I got the same results as above. How did you add the break? Normal way is to drag the symbol to the measure after which you want the break to appear, and release it once the measure highlights. As I said above, if you've done it correctly, you will actually see the green icon for the break displaying above the staff. Save, reopen, and it should still be there.

In reply to by twiddly bits

Great!

FYI, double clicking a palette icon to add it to the score generally works only for items to be attached to notes or rests, not to items attached to measures or otherwise more free-floating. I duplicated what you describe - double clicking the break icon with the measure selected does *appear* to insert the break - but you'll see the icon never actually appears. And if you try inserting a break anywhere else this way, you'll see that the "apparent" break still occurs before the anacrusis. So I think what is really happening here is that this line of your score was just on the cusp of needing to spill over to the next line, and really, just about anything you do (even just clicking a note and arrowing it up or down, or dragging a dynamic) will have the same effect.

Probably there is some algorithm that "rounds" the length of the line, and your line was sitting right on the line 9.5 and 9.4999 measures, so sometimes it rounded up, sometimes down. At least, that's what I always assume when I see similar behavior where a measure can't seem to decide what line it needs to be on. Or there might be an outright bug that causes line length to be calculated incorrectly in some cases.

Anyhow, that's why I never rely on luck of the draw for my line breaks if I care about them at all. I also use explicit line breaks even if MuseScore is currently breaking in places I like. And then as an extra step, it's not a bad idea to select the whole score and reduce stretch a notch after locking in your breaks, just to make sure there is room to spare and it won't need to split a line again. Nothing will appear to change in the score since the line breaks are locked in, but it's good insurance against these sort of round off errors or whatever is going on in your case.

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