Beaming issues
I have noticed that when I am writing a score in cut time, if you have two pairs of dotted eighth notes and a sixteenth notes, they beam together as shown here, regardless of what beat it starts on: https://image.ibb.co/jY49tw/schubertfantasyinfmoll.png
however, if you have a piece in common time, regardless of what kind of beaming the piece calls for, the dotted eight + 16 notes are split, as shown here: https://image.ibb.co/iT3kYw/schubertfantasyinfmoll.png
which leaves the user with no choice but to beam together the notes one by one, which is incredibly tedious. additionally, there is no clear cut way to modify the time signature via the master palette so that these notes are beamed in a specific way as the time signature master palette currently only supports modifying the beaming between groups of common notes i.e eights, sixteenths, etc., not for somewhat abstract pairs like a dotted 8th and a 16th note. it would be nice if there was another way to do this besides beaming the pairs one by one.
i mean sure i could just change it to cut time, but that would be like changing a piece that is in 2/4 time to 4/4 time. all the notes would get half the value that they actually deserve; a whole note would sound like a half; a half like a quarter; a quarter like an eighth; its just not right. there are exceptions but for the intents and purposes of my problem, theyre kind of irrelevant.
another issue that's been bothering me is that it is still impossible to beam notes across pages/systems without the beam appearing somewhere it shouldnt be. is there already a bug report for this? im really hoping that that will get fixed in ms3
Comments
It is quite strange that the beams are set the same in both common and cut time and you get such different results. I'm not sure why this happens since they look the same.
4/4 time beams like cut time. If you apply 4/4 and right click the time signature you can change time signature properties to display the C. You have to do this for each staff though. You can also use the master palette, select 4/4 and change display to C, this will use the 4/4 beaming that you can apply to the score. For cut time, you can create a new cut time and make the 1/8 notes all beam in groups of 2 for the other beaming. The default cut time is what I normally expect to see.
FWIW, those defaults are semi-standard, although different editors have different preferences here. It's definitely the case that in 4/4, most editors would break the beams every beat. Lots more variance in how different editors would treat it in cut time. Not uite sure what you are wanting here - you want eighths and sixteenths in 4/4 to be beamed in individual beats, but this specific rhythm to all be beamed together as a two-beat pattern? Seems very non-standard to me, but yes, if that's the effect you are going for it, you'd need to override the beams as they occur. If the rhythm occurs often, might be good to copy and paste it. Also be sure to define a keyboard shortcut for the beam commands to simplify the operation.
There is indeed already a bug report for beaming across line / page breaks - see #16278: Beaming notes over barlines and line breaks.