Inconsistent beaming between 4/4 and 2/2
Same behaviour in 2.1 and latest nightly build for 3. Bug or by design?
Right-clicking and going to "Time Signature Properties" shows "Note Groups" to be the same for each time signature.
I've not looked at the code, but my hypothesis is that when deciding whether to set a note to "beam start" or "beam middle" the beaming rules only consider the duration of the note in question without taking neighbouring notes into account. As the most common case, 4/4 must have been given special handling.
Gould's beaming rules are hard to fathom beyond "don't beam across the middle of the bar in an even time signature", but the attached image of the opening bars of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 seem to support the view that notes should be beamed according to the shortest note in the group.
| Attachment | Size |
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| brandenburg-3-beaming.png | 996.77 KB |
Comments
The code, FWIW, is in Groups::endBeam() and the layout code that calls this - eg, Score::layoutStage2(). I think it isn't so much that there is special casing for 4/4 but that we use the denominator of the timesig to determine how deep in the groups to look and where the beat divisions are.