Serious flaws in copy/paste operations for Staff Text Properties

I’m starting work on an arrangement that uses bariolage extensively in the guitar part. The piece is about 80 bars long, and for all of it, the guitar is playing steady bariolé 16th notes, alternating between the open B string (2) and B3 fretted on the G string (3), or the open E (1) and E4 fretted on the B string.

In order to get this to sound right in playback, I chose the C-trumpet for the staff instrument, then changed the staff name to Guitar. The trumpet allocates 2 channels, normal and mute, which I’m sending to LinuxSampler. The “normal” channel is loaded with one guitar soundfont, and the “mute” channel is loaded with a slightly duller guitar soundfont, which replicates the sound of a fretted string.

For each open-string note, I create Staff Text with the numeral “1” and assign it to the “normal” channel with the Staff Text Properties dialogue. For each fretted-string note, I create Staff Text with the number “2” and assign it to the “mute” channel. In the final score, the 1s and 2s will be invisible.

The first bar I set up this way sounds just the way I want. However, 80 bars at 16 16ths per bar works out to 1,280 notes, and I obviously don’t want to perform the text+channel assignments 1,280 times.

Knowing that Muscescore doesn’t copy Staff Text, tempo markings, or dynamics when you block select a bar (a serious, serious drawback in Musescore when scores require repeats to be written out in full—the recapitulation in classical sonata form, for example), I figured I’d copy my first bar to the remaining 79 bars, change whatever notes needed changing; then, having selected and copied my “1” Staff Text, use Ctrl-click to select all the notes requiring channel 1 (7 per bar) and paste the Staff Text onto them.

Guess what? No go. Apparently, you can’t “group paste” in Musescore.

First workaround for “no group pasting” of Staff Text

Okay, I thought, I’ll copy my “1” and paste it individually onto every note requiring it. Click, ctrl-v, click, ctrl-v, click, ctrl-v... Then I’ll do the same thing for every note requiring “2”. Click, ctrl-v, click, ctrl-v, click, ctrl-v...

I tried this on a couple of bars, and discovered, on playback, that Musescore wasn’t copying the channel assignments. When I called up the Staff Text Properties, it said the channel assignments were correct (ie “normal” or “mute”), but the playback wasn’t respecting them.

Second workaround for “no group pasting” of Staff Text

I discovered that the only way to get what I wanted was to

1. select Staff Text “1” (click)
2. copy “1” (ctrl-c)
3. select the next note requiring “1” (click)
4. paste “1” (ctrl-v)
5. select Staff Text “2” (click)
6. copy “2” (ctrl-c)
7. select the next note requiring “2” (click)
8. paste “2” (ctrl-v)
9. repeat steps 1-4 for the next note requiring “1”
10. repeat steps 5-8 for the next note requiring “2”

and so on and so on and so on. In short, getting the correct channel assignment for all 1,280 notes is going to mean performing 5,120 one-at-a-time operations, and that’s just for the guitar part!

Clearly, there’s a bug in the copy/paste operations of Musescore if my first workaround doesn’t work, and an overall design flaw if what ought to be simply a matter of selecting a bar and copying ALL the data associated requires instead the insanely laborious second workaround.

Sure hope this gets fixed in the mythical 2.0 release.