Order of note entry
Coming from Finale, I am used to entering notes as: Duration, Pitch, Alteration. That is, I select the duration with the numberpad, tap the pitch on the QWERTY keyboard entering the note, and adding any alteration such as sharp, flat, or dot.
In MS4, it seems that the order is Duration, Alteration, Pitch. I'm having a little trouble working this way. Am I missing something, or is there a way to make MS work the way I'd like it to?
Comments
Duration, Note name, Accidental was how it worked, until about 5(?) years ago someone decided that was "inconsistent" (not sure what it was not consistent with) and it was changed to duration, accidental, note name. I got used to it after a couple of weeks. There was a fair bit of discussion over whether it was a good change and "consistency" won over "tradition" (I was in the traditional camp).
However, a lot of people were using Duration, Note name, Alteration. where alteration is done using the arrow keys which alter the pitch a semitone at a time. This didn't change and so consistency v tradition didn't affect them.
Whichever way you do it, you get used to what you use frequently.
Augmentation dots are part of setting the duration of course and so very logically come after setting the base duration.
MS4: Shortcuts: "Add accidental: " and then flat/sharp/whatever.
That seems to be what you'd want. They don't "toggle" for note entry tools, but they function afterwards and within note-entry as the "old-school" versions.
P.S. History-wise: MS3.3 (around Nov 21, 2019): https://musescore.org/en/node/297455 + https://musescore.org/en/node/297458
For some reason, I thought there'd be a quick update soon after to allow for post-entry application in 2019 after having what I thought was a fruitful discussion, but I got used to the new behavior, forgot, and then waited for a year and nothing happened, so I got a pull request for an alternative set of shortcuts of the old style (If using that, the keywords are "Note Input" and "non-toggle") in end of 2020 because some dudes still made mention of it, just a little while before "3.x" was locked-down so that no one would "waste time" on it and apply efforts solely to master-branch Mu4.
To re-iterate though, imho it is worth attempting to get used to the newer pre-toggle style. At least both options are available in Mu4 now, and again also 3.6.2/"3.7"
Hope this helps.