XML bugs
I apologize if this topic has been covered to death, but I am having difficulty zeroing in on a solution to my problem.
I am the music director for a community theatre company in Chatham, ON, Canada, and this season we are producing an original musical written by a local team. The composer is using Sibelius (I don't know which version) and I am assisting on expanding the orchestrations using Musescore 1.3.
- There appear to be numerous issues importing xml files to Musescore at this time. There are display issues, where beat 1 of a measure sometimes appears before the clef and key/time signatures.
- Score text, which appears properly formatted on Sibelius and PDF formats, is often mis-aligned, mis-placed, or hidden by notes on the staff.
- Playback is often erratic, with notes sometimes sounding on the wrong portion of a beat, and triplets are a real mess.
- Playback tempo defaults to 100 BPM regardless of score settings.
- Voice selections are generally ignored.
- Some songs create a QT runtime error and crash Musescore entirely.
(my desktop computer is running Windows Vista Home Premium, and my laptop is running Windows 7 Starter... both platforms display the same anomalies)
Thank you in advance for any assistance that you may provide. As yet I have NO saveable work, and rehearsals begin in three weeks. HELP!
Regards,
Tom
NOTE: The attached song is NOT my work, and I have no copyright to it, however it is a piece that I will hopefully be able to work with to create orchestrations.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| 12 - Best Friend Tango.xml | 786.65 KB |
Comments
XML import and support is much better in the "nightly" release (the up'n coming version 2), as is tuplets. You can download it from the download page (half-way down) and try your XML in it as it will surprise you. Don't use it for serious work yet.
In reply to XML import and support is by schepers
Thank you very much. XML Import seems much better with the nightly builds. Hopefully it will be stable enough for my needs.
Regards,
Tom
In reply to Thank you very much. XML by toffle
Also, keep in mind that some of the issues you are highlighting are just problems due to the format and the process of importing exporting MusicXML. In particular, the position/appearance of texts is not something that can be preserved.
In reply to Also, keep in mind that some by [DELETED] 5
Thank you for this reminder, though it appears that with the nightly build helping with XML note positions, some of the text issues are less obvious.
I suppose it's kind of like expecting a stir-fry to look the same in a soup pot as it does in a wok.
In reply to Thank you for this reminder, by toffle
A comparison of the current MuseScore trunk and Finale NotePad 2012 after loading the attached file does show a number of differences, but (IMHO) no major issues. I noticed:
Non-printing staves are visible in MuseScore (e.g. the "Emile" staff in the first system and the "H." staff in the last two systems on page 2. As far as I know, hidden staves in a system are not supported by MuseScore.
A spurious brace is found on the piano part (which is easily removed by "cut"ting the first one).
Several layout differences. MuseScores page defaults conflict with encoded system and page breaks. The information is in the xml file, but not completely imported by MuseScore. Cleaning up requires manually tweaking the layout.
Some page 1 footer text is missing ("Jenne Wason", "The Little Rockette - 12" and "Joseph Benoit").
All in all I believe MuseScore MusicXML import performs reasonably well. Did I miss any important issues ? Are any of these issues showstoppers for you ?
In reply to A comparison of the current by Leon Vinken
Thank you for the detailed analysis of my particular case.
In Musescore 1.3 the attached file is almost unusable, but in the nightly build, the issues seem mainly cosmetic. Most of the irregularities are minor, and can be dealt with in the course of normal editing. (page breaks, braces, etc.)
I would like to address the headers and footers issue, but cannot seem to locate the metadata option on the nightly build. (it is under the Edit menu in 1.3) The missing texts ("Jenne Wason", "The Little Rockette - 12" and "Joseph Benoit") are the lyricist, project/song, and composer respectively. Is there any way to access the hidden data in the XML file? There will be at minimum a couple of dozen individual files in the completed project, and I would like to spare the effort of restoring missing data in each file.
Thank you once again. It is starting to appear as though I just might make the first of many upcoming deadlines. (one of these days I will learn the word "no", but that would just make my life less interesting.)
Regards,
Tom
In reply to Thank you for the detailed by toffle
Metadata is in File -> Info now.
You can change header and footer in Style -> general -> Header and footer.
In reply to Metadata is in File -> Info by [DELETED] 5
Thank you again.
After a couple of hours reading XML 3.0 tutorials, I now know much more than I ever thought I would need to work as a humble arranger. It is an understatement to say that I am very impressed at the amount of data that must be encoded/decoded to make it possible to exchange music across the many platforms of software. It seems that there may be a difference between being "compatible" with XML 3.0 and "fully implemented". As such, it appears that presently Musescore is unable to read some data in the "score header entity". For those who are interested, it takes as many as 26 lines of XML code to store basic header data, some of which may be left blank by the source software, or unimplemented in the reading software. Again, I am impressed that Musescore is even able to deal with the data without crashing.
The following appears to be the fields that are present in the saved file, but not yet readable in Musescore. (the interesting thing is, I wrote this in XML format and the forum software parsed it quite nicely)
-
- Best Friend Tango
-
-
- Joseph Benoit
- Jenne Wason
- Copyright © 2013
-
- 2013-08-11
- Moi
- Sibelius 7.1.3
- Direct export, not from Dolet
- Sibelius / MusicXML 3.0
-...
In reply to Thank you again. After a by toffle
Actually most of texts you mention are read by MuseScore (nightly builds) and can be found in score information window (see menu File / Info...). The copyright is incorrectly set to "Best Friend Tango", which is bug I can easily fix.
The reason the lyricist, project/song, and composer are missing is that they are in the footer and MuseScore expects them in the header. Once again, this can probably be fixed.
Finally, adding the MusicXML composer and lyricist fields to the score information window is not difficult, just work to do.
I'll see what I can do on short notice.
In case you find real (non cosmetic) MusicXML import errors, I'd like to know. Please post any information you have, preferably in the "technology review" forum. This will help improving MuseScore.
In reply to Actually most of texts you by Leon Vinken
Fix for the first two issues #22365: [MusicXML] problems importing title and subtitle from footer available in pull request #455. Once this is merged in, the nightly builds should read the missing texts from the attached file without problems.
In reply to Fix for the first two issues by Leon Vinken
Created issue #22399: [MusicXML] import / export creator metadata to complete the metadata read from MusicXML.
In reply to Actually most of texts you by Leon Vinken
Thank you so much, I agree that once the tuplets/note placement errors were cleared up by switching to the nightly builds, most of the other problems turned out to be cosmetic.
With each new release, Musescore becomes stronger and stronger. Keep up the great work! I look forward to the release of 2.0 (or the next stable release, whatever it is named)
Regards,
Tom
In reply to Thank you so much, I agree by toffle
Fix for #22399: [MusicXML] import / export creator metadata available in pull request #459.