Would like: "Restore instruments as per their names, best attempt"
I frequently find myself downloading scores which people have "Upload Audio"'d using nondefault sound fonts. I can't play them or revise them (for teaching or whatever). All the instruments come out "crazy" because the needed font isn't there and the mappings of the patch numbers, of course, differ.
The process of re-making "Violin" into "Violin", "Oboe" into "Oboe", etc. is tedious and error-prone. I understand that when people prepare such scores with a non-English enviroment, this is even harder. But I would like to have a button that tried its best to do this for me. I shouldn't have to explain that "Violin really means 'Violin', at least for now".
Comments
+1
How do you expect Musescore to map instruments to whatever soundfont you have installed? When people use soundfonts that don't adhere to General MIDI, it's impossible to map them automatically.
In reply to How do you expect Musescore… by onebitboy
When people use such a sound-font, they use the mixer to get the nonstandard sound or mapping. The name "Violin" or "Cello" or whatever that the part first had stays, even though the mixer mapping has changed. Of course, this only works for sound fonts being used to provide "better versions", yes, on non-GM numbers, remapped in the mixer. This has been the case with every score I have ever seen using "better" soundfonts for standard instruments -- the patch number and names differ, but the "instrument name" on the part, not the patch name, remains the same. It is a tedious manual process that needs automatic help.
And as I said, "best attempt", i.e., if the names have been changed, or different language, skip that part.
In reply to How do you expect Musescore… by onebitboy
In the instruments.xml file where the instruments are defined, there is a midi sound channel number assigned to each instrument. When you add an instrument, it uses this information to set up the mixer in a way that will mostly sound pleasing as long as the first soundfont in your synthesizer is a GM compliant font.
When people use custom soundfonts and change to non-GM standard sound channels, the user sets the sounds to custom defined sound channels. If these are not the same as GM standard sound channel numbers loading the score into your version of MuseScore results in crazy sounding playback. If there are 3 instruments it's not a big deal to set those 3 instruments to their proper sounds. If you have a 45 instrument orchestral piece, this becomes quite the chore. Having a single button to reset the sounds to the channels defined in instruments.xml would be useful for these situation.
I've become increasingly aware of the need for a global "reset everything and I mean everything" command that would do things like reset all style settings and staff properties, remove all manual adjustments made in the Inspector or text toolbar or via edit mode, remove all spacers, etc. Now I can add mixer settings to the wish list for this command :-)
In reply to I've become increasingly… by Marc Sabatella
This is something I've been hoping for too. At the moment, it's quite difficult to keep track of all the customised settings.
In reply to I've become increasingly… by Marc Sabatella
Don't remove articulation adjustments (or allow me to opt that out).