[solved] Creating a score from scratch without any bars

• Aug 17, 2022 - 17:54

Is it possible in MuseScore to create a score without bars and without time signatures at all?

I don't mean choosing some some weird key signature like 25/12 and then deleting it, nor do I mean creating several bars with some time signature (in the first bar) and later joining them together with consequent deleting of the time signature.

What I mean is really creating a score from the scratch without ever specifying the time signature and, therefore, having no bars at all.


Comments

Create a score and set the actual duration of the first bar to something suitably large - 500/4 for example h in bar properties from the right click menu. If you run out of room, just make the actual length bigger. You will need to use Continuous view or set the paper width to something huge, otherwise your long bar will extend past what you can see. After filling the bar you can then split it where convenient to get it to fit in a normal sized page.

The ways you describe are the way. Well, I'd recommend the join/split method - way easier in most cases. You can join the measures before entering notes too, then split when you feel you've reached the end oa line. If you do this a lot, define shortcuts for join & split via Edit / Preferences Shortcuts.

BTW, don't delete the time signature - turn it off in staff/part properties, or make it invisible with "V".

In reply to by innerthought

Yes. Internally MuseScore currently will read the score as 4/4 and plug in some default rules for beaming and so forth when finding no time signature. But that could change in a future release - different defaults rules might be applied leading to subtle and not-so-subtle changes in how your score looks and behaves, including score corruptions leading crashes, loss of data, etc. Even sticking with the same release, without an explicit time signature, some of those things might be filled in kind of randomly, leading to the same problems from one day to the next. Just not worth all that risk, for absolutely no benefit.

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