"Add to Clipboard" option

• Oct 9, 2017 - 03:21

Currently Musescore's clipboard only allows copying and pasting one selection at a time. When copying and pasting parts of score into another, it would be handy to have an "add to clipboard" option in the right-click menu that would append the current selection to the last copied selection. This would allow the user to copy non-adjacent measures either sequentially or simultaneously, using ctrl instead of shift, for example. When pasting, the multiple selections, in the order they were copied, would be inserted as one concatenated passage.

I would like to be ble to copy various one-beat rhythmic ostinati from a template at one time and paste them together in the score to be repitched later, for example. Currently, I have to go back and forth.

Comments

• Oct 9, 2017 - 17:23

Interesting idea. Would probably be non-trivial to design and implement well, but it might be nice to see examples of similar functions in other software to get an idea of how this might be expected to work.

Reply

• Oct 9, 2017 - 18:49

Less but also more powerful in a certain sense (and certainly less complex to implement) would be to allow to have several virtual clipboards (10 would be nice).
For the use case of the OP, it would require to copy the several parts to clip1, clip2, ... and to paste from clip1, clip2, ...
Instead of pasting all in once as proposed but already much easier than always going back and forth.
And giving other opportunities such as pasting in a certain order, then in another one, ...
Swapping between more than 2 passages would also be easy using these multiple clipboards.

Reply

• Oct 9, 2017 - 22:39

Sounds like another good alternative. How does one keep track of the content in each virtual clipboard, though? With most standard system-wide clipboard managers, like copyq, they list the history of previous selections which are available by clicking on them.

Reply

• Oct 9, 2017 - 22:34

In Linux, it is fairly easy to create a system-wide shortcut (e.g., ctl+shift+c) to append the clipboard content with the current selection, without deleting the previous copied content, by installing a utility like xsel and linking a custom command to the shortcut. The simplest way is to install xsel and then create a shortcut linked to the following command: bash -c "xsel | xsel -ab" . This pipes the primary buffer/selection into the system's clipboard. (-a appends the content rather than replacing it). Printf can be used to add a new line between each selection, as in the following: printf "%b\n%b" "$(xsel -b)" "$(xsel)" | xsel -ib ; xsel -c
(more at https://askubuntu.com/questions/797132/how-to-only-append-to-clipboard-…)
While the xsel solution works for most content, it doesn't work with Musescore. I suspect appending selections within Musescore would be much more complex than this.. It appears that Musescore uses some other copying process than the primary buffer?

Reply

• Oct 10, 2017 - 15:47

MuseScore's internal format would be of no use to any other program; pasting into Word or whatever. So while it would technically be possible to expose MuseScore's own clipboard to other programs, it wouldn't be very useful, except maybe to satisfy curiosity. Eg, pasting into Word would show the raw XML format that looks something like an excerpt from an MSCX file. And unfortunately, I don't think merely concatenating two such blocks would actually work, they'd probably need to be reprocessed to handle things like getting correct time offsets etc. It's possible it wouldn't be difficult though - could be a very interesting programming project for someone with good general knowledge of such things but just getting started wrapping their brain around MuseScore internals.

Reply

• Nov 8, 2017 - 01:46

MuseScore is presently, without the clipboard option, unable to transfer even the lyrical text to something like Word. I needed this feature a few days ago, and found it sadly lacking. I was able to select one word of the lyrics, then right click to the menu and select all similar elements, which highlighted all of the lyrics correctly. About the only thing useful for me from there would be to delete them en masse, which I have done a few times. But I was unable to transfer them to something like PowerPoint.

For my part, even having some XML mixed in with it that I could manually remove via a quick regex in my favorite text editor would be far more helpful than needing to manually retype it all, or to copy/paste a single syllable at a time (horrible!). Because I'm working with an Asian script that is difficult to type, I've resorted to the syllable-at-a-time copying more than once--but it seems like a completely unnecessary tedium. Could the clipboard at least copy the text?

Reply

• Nov 8, 2017 - 12:26

Why is it a special command instead of just 'copy'?
From MS-Excel, if you do a simple copy of cells, when you paste in excel it is interpreted with all the structured excel information, and when you paste in notepad just the text of copied cells is pasted.
The same should be done for Lyrics: just copy, when paste in MuseScore, interpret with all the knowledge of MuseScore, when paste in simple text editor just the text of the lyrics is pasted.

Reply

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.