Musescore's treatment of repeat barlines
Quite a lot of traditional (British Isles) music consists of an A section that is repeated once followed by a B section that is repeated once - AABB form. There are many such tunes published and they often omit the opening repeat barlines for both the A section and the B section - they just have closing repeat barlines at the end of each section.
When these are played in Musescore then the form that is played is AABAB and not AABB. See/hear attached example.
This seems like a bug to me, but I don't know for sure. If it is not a bug then can someone please point me to an explanation as to why Musescore does this.
Musescore will play the correct form if an opening repeat barline is inserted at the beginning of the B section.
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| #7 Planxty_Irwin (Musescore 3).mscz | 13.56 KB |
Comments
If you omit a start barline that MuseScore expects, you will get unexpected results. I'm surprised the second repeat wasn't ignored completely. You must enter a start barline for proper playback. If you don't want to see it to have traditional display, then you can make it invisible by selecting it and pressing v.
In reply to If you omit a start barline… by mike320
Thanks for the speedy reply.
I am happy to put in the repeat barline, but I am trying to understand why Musescore treats these pieces the way that it does.
Wkipedia says 'The beginning of the repeated passage can be marked by a begin-repeat sign; if this is absent the repeat is understood to be from the beginning of the piece or movement.'
So, is the beginning of the B part a 'movement'? I guess that Musescore thinks not so it repeats right from the beginning of the piece.
Wikipedia's definition of a 'movement' includes a ' section' and it seems to me that both A part and the B part are both sections.
In reply to Thanks for the speedy reply… by Bufflehead
An end repeat bar line is not considered to be the end of a section or movement of a song. They are clearly identified by breaks in the systems and the introduction of beginning of a movement info, like a key signature, time signature and tempo. These aren't 100%, but it is clear that a new section or movement has begun. The simple placement of a repeat bar line has never been sufficient to make this clear.
You can identify this as the beginning of a section by inserting a section break. If you right click the section break, you can select the layout break properties and set the options so playback is as you like.
I do not doubt that British folk music has some non-standard notation. I've seen few folk traditions that are without their own idiosyncrasies. Many can be worked through and I've explained one possibility for your situation here.
You can omit the start repeat barline if you want to jump to the first measure of a section and you can omit the end repeat barline when you want to repeat from the last measure of a section, but otherwise start and end repeat barlines need to match. Sections are delimited by start and and of score and by section breaks.
Mike and Jojo - thank you.