Album
This is not a request for a new feature but an urgent plea: Bring the album function back as soon as possible. I have a lot more tedious work to do without it.
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As soon as possible == MuseScore 4, for which an Album-like functionality will be in the works.
You could always use MS2.3.2 to compose an Album out of existing scores and then open the resulting score back in the current version for styling etc..
But everything the Album feature did you can still achieve manually. If your scores exist already, then the effort might be a bit bigger than if you're still starting from scratch, because system elements can't be copy-pasted, but nothing should block/prevent you from continuing your project at all.
See https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/6145
In reply to See https://github.com… by Jojo-Schmitz
What I am doing is a three movement piece (classical) with 8 parts. I did the score in three files, one for each movement. To print the score I just export Pdf files and combine those into one (after adjusting the page numbers obviously).
For the parts however this is not flexible enough. It is difficult enough to arrange for readability and page turns with one file, with Pdfs I have to also arrange for a page break for each movement. So I have long used the album function for that and it was extremely efficient.
For this project (first time with musescore 3.6) I had already started to do this manually. The last movement has several changes in meter and keys. This forces me to copy / paste the movement in sections. Of the first four parts I did this way (close to an hour per part) two ended up having an incorrect overall number of measures. With all the care I took still made mistakes. Quite a bit more time was spent fixing the errors.
I have now found a work around. I take one of the finished parts, type command a (on Mac) and all the notes go away but rehearsal marks, key signatures, tempi, time signatures* all remain. Then I do the copy/pasting and the part is done. I can start arranging page turns, add cues and perfectionize the appearance. This is quite efficient.
In reply to What I am doing is a three… by azumbrunn
See also #165746: Request option to copy system elements with copy/paste (ALL ELEMENTS)
In reply to See also[#165746] by Jojo-Schmitz
I even remember reading this thread from back in the day when I myself did not yet have such complicated problem. I can see now what the reasons are. What is clear from this thread though is that this is a real problem. The album function solved much of this problem. I don't quite understand why it was de-prioritized for Musescore 3.
At any rate one problem not addressed in the thread you quote is posting music into measures with a different time signature. This is always undesired (or so I believe) and leads to absurd looking and useless scores. The system should either refuse to paste in this situation or send a warning before pasting ("time signatures don't match, do you really want to paste?").
I tried my work around yesterday again. It looks fine at first sight but weird stuff came up when I looked at the result in more detail (key signatures appeared that were not in the "template" nor in the score for example and I think the files are corrupted in some ways; I can't delete these unwanted signatures). I'll retry and see if I can reproduce this.
In reply to I even remember reading this… by azumbrunn
Just to add: I think it is desirable to enter large scores in several "chunks" and to combine them at the end. I at least find it unhandy to deal with orchestral scores with many hundred measures on the screen. And the system still slows down some as your score gets larger (at least on my aging MacBook) though this has improved significantly with version 2. I would not even try that as things are now; I believe it is nearly impossible to do the required copy/paste steps for a whole score (as opposed to parts) without making an error.
In reply to Just to add: I think it is… by azumbrunn
The hope is the performance improvements in MsueScore 3 should be enough that there is no longer any reason to break a score into pieces. It would be interesting to try a raw copy/paste assembly of your score - knowing full well that it will be missing system elements, key and time signature changes, etc - just to see how it performs today. 3.0 brought major improvements in page view, then 3.1 (or was it 3.2) brought the same to continuous view. We continued to tweak things since, to the point now where there are very few operations that would cause any noticeable slowdown even on very large scores.
In reply to The hope is the performance… by Marc Sabatella
It is true that I have not seen performance problems with MS 3; I remember them mostly from symphonic scores I did with MS 2. (The present one is 3 soloists and strings.) But I feel I don't want to deal with files too large; they become difficult to handle on the screen. I am one of the minority who use page view to enter. It makes it somewhat easier to locate earlier measures (e.g. to enter repeated passages using copy/paste). But maybe continuous view is easier with large scores.
I have since generated two more parts without problems using my work around. Here are the exact steps:
2a. For each section enter time and key signatures prior to pasting.
2b. If a section contains changes in key or meter break it up into subsections and copy/paste them one at a time.
2c. If any section starts with an upbeat set up a partial measure matching the upbeat measure (using the measure properties dialogue) prior to pasting.
2d. Set measure numbers at the beginning of each section to 1 such that they match the measure numbers in the score. Make sure every section contains the same number of measures in the part and the score. Correct errors now.
I won't give an absolute guarantee yet but so far it has been working really well. The key is to be really careful when creating the "template". After that the procedure is quite effective.
Finally, I am going to attach the the scores of the three movements if someone wants to test performance with them. For me they are doing fine, except that replay is quite noisy (I upload to MS.com to get a better replay. The music dates from 1922, in the public domain. I'll post it to IMSLP where I found the manuscript (Julius Röntgen is the composer).
In reply to It is true that I have not… by azumbrunn
I generally prefer page view as well most of the time. Sometimes I'll set an artificially wide page to minimize system / page breaks, but usually not. And also, while we have continuous view working "almost" as fast as page view, it's not quite at least in some situations.
Your basic procedure for the copy seems logical, as you say, it's a matter of being careful. One thing to consider is, maybe don't even both entering some of those details until you get to the combining stage.
I should mention also some people have found success by actually copying and pasting directly within the MSCX file (each MSCZ file is a ZIP file containing an MSCX< or you can save as MSCX directly). I don't recommend risking your actual score this way, but saving an MSCX copy of the movements and then pasting them together into one long MSCX could be interesting. Probably you have to figure out how to adjust the tags at the top and the bottom of the score, but allegedly everything else goes smoothly.