Cannot type the letter "a" anywhere in Muse Score

• Oct 21, 2017 - 22:14
Reported version
2.1
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
closed
Project

Very odd. I cannot type "a" in text, chords, titles, or anywhere in Muse Score 2.1 for a few days now. In other apps on the PC I can, so a workaround is to paste in the missing letter when I need to. The behaviour is that if I am typing a string of text, the "a" will be ignored and so will the next letter. After that, the typing is recognised and continues, as long as it avoids "a".

I have been using 2.1 for quite a while with no such problem, so I cannot say it's a "bug". But I can happily type that letter in every other app on the PC.

I have uninstalled the program and downloaded and reinstalled. Still the same problem. The only thing that I may have changed in the program is that, around that time, I chose to try out the Jazz Chord font to get the handy superscript "o" for my Dim 7th chords.
But since reinstalling from a fresh download, I have simply tried typing alphabetical letters, no chords, no changes from the default download. Win 10, HP Pavilion dm1

I am not very computer-literate, a musician-user rather than a tech expert.


Comments

I would suggest you first look at your shortcuts in the edit->Preferences menu. There is a tab that says shortcuts. If A is assigned to anything but adding the note A, it is probably the problem. You can select the item and click the "Clear" button at the bottom of the window. On the subject of shortcuts, can you enter the note A using the keyboard? You didn't mention anything about that, perhaps because you don't use the keyboard to enter notes.

Sounds like you (perhaps inadvertently) redefined that key to be a shortcut for some command or other. Try Help / Revert to Factory Settings - reinstall doesn't do this. If that doesn't fix it, please attach a sample score and give precise steps to reproduce the problem.

Yes, now solved, thanks very much to all who replied. mike320 and marc were correct... I had forgotten that, to start up the ABC import plug-in (which I had never needed before), I had hastily made a shortcut A,B,C I have now cleared that, and "a" is typing OK. By the way, using the "A" key to enter that note into a score still worked OK, even though the letter couldn't be typed anywhere.
I must look again at how to start up that plug-in: I didn't study the matter properly, as I was trying something new in a hurry to help someone out.

Once you have installed a plugin you can start it directly from the plugin menu.

In the future, if you have questions or problems using MuseScore, best to ask for help in the Support forum.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

The initial problem of not being able to type an A anywhere seems like a bug. A shortcut for a plugin should not even affect a text box, it should simply be passed on to the text box with all plugin shortcuts ignored. There are some text specific shortcuts that work such as F2, ctrl-b and so forth. The ones that affect text boxes should be the only ones active in a text box. Also, he should not have been able to enter an A note in the music consistently. My experience with duplicate shortcuts leads me to expect a random (or every other time) execution of a shortcut. That's why F2 got removed as a default shortcut to transpose a song. I vote for this to continue to be an open bug report.

I'd suggest opening a new one that addresses the issue more generally. Or seeing if one already exists. We do have different "states" for different commands, so for instance Space can do different things for chord symbol or lyric input mode versus regular text input mode versus normal mode. A problem with plugins is that some are probably designed to work on different modes. So restricting the modes in which a plugin shortcut is available could be beneficial for some plugins but detrimental for others.

The real question for me then is why the conflict wasn't detected - "A" should.habe not been available for reassignment. I think that might be a known bug already fixed in master?