Custom Area Screenshot Tool
Hello, First and foremost I really appreciate MuseScore and I have been supporting the product over the more mainstream ones for a long time as it helped me a lot through high school and college.
That said, I like many others find myself writing or transcribing music, and performing it via video with the music score bits written right under it, then I post that said video onto social media platforms.
Currently the way to do that is that I have to write the project in MuseScore, export the entire piece in MuseScore, open up another software like Photoshop, start a new project, drop the image in, crop the image, export cropped area, CTRL+Z, crop the image in a different spot, export cropped area, CTRL+Z, crop the image in a different spot, export cropped area, CTRL+Z,........you get it, then drop it into the video and start editing that.
This process adds a bit of extra steps and time that I feel like is kind of unnecessary. I would love to see a plugin, or ready built feature that allows us to drag and drop across an area of the score, and export that section as either a JPEG, PNG, or both. A really good example of this would be something like the Firefox Plugin "Easy Screenshot" - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easyscreenshot/ . Now that plugin allows for editing as well which im not asking for (though I wouldn't be mad if we got it ;) )
I tried actually making the plugin via ChatGPT4 and I got stopped when it told me that I wouldn't be able to fully make the tool I wanted because I would have to change the underlying code. - "For a full custom screenshot tool that can select a specific area of the score, you would likely need to modify MuseScore's underlying C++ code, create a new build of MuseScore with your changes, and possibly extend the QML API to expose the necessary functionality to your plugin."
That said it did start the process and gave me a bunch of QML code that I would happily send over to someone if they were interested.
Anyways that you for your time and again thank you for this awesome software!
Comments
One of the reasons I remain with MS3 is that it has the camera tool which will do exactly what you want… You can run MS3 and MS4 on the same machine so if you compose in MS4 and then export as xml you can open it in MS3. (Caveat: this may not work in all circumstances.)
In reply to One of the reasons I remain… by Brer Fox
Oh really? That's awesome, ill definitely look this up and report back.
Thank you so much!
In reply to One of the reasons I remain… by Brer Fox
I guess for other people I just wanted to drop this here. I found the tool that you were talking about and a link for it. And you were right it is for MuseScore3, and it actually works exactly like I wanted. Thank you for the help!
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/3/image-capture
If your "music score bits" (which are written under the video performance) consist of an image of the music (e.g., of a single system) which changes as the music is played, you might be able to leverage Format > Page settings to create all those "cropped areas" at once.
Open the score and make the page size very wide and adjust the height to allow for a single system. Be sure to use Format > Add/remove system breaks so that everything flows onto the newly dimensioned pages. The score can be exported as png (with each "page" a different image). The page width will determine how much music is contained on a page.