Trying to delete a score I imported from pdf

• Jun 24, 2024 - 21:44

Everything tells me to go to open the score and go to the icon of three vertical dots and click it and choose delete. But I cannot find that icon when I am viewing the score.


Comments

There are at least two quite different meanings of that phrase ("delete a score") in MuseScore.

To delete the file from your hard drive, simply use the Windows File Explorer or the Mac Finder application. Browse to the folder where you saved the file, select it, and hit the Delete button on your keyboard. Alternatively, right-click the file in File Explorer/Finder and from the context menu click the Delete option.

To remove the score from the list of scores on MuseScore's Scores screen, on the Home tab, it's a little more complicated. On most computers you can clear that list (i.e., remove all entries from it) by clicking File / Open recent, then slide all the way to the bottom of the list. You may see the option there to Clear recent files.

If that option is not there, or if you wish to remove only this one file from the list (or any amount less than the entire list), follow the instructions in this thread to modify a particular file on your hard drive: https://musescore.org/en/node/361021. (These are the instruction for Windows. I assume that the instructions to do the same are similar on Mac or Linux, but I don't know the details.)

Good luck!!!

In reply to by TheHutch

Thanks for the responses. [Warning: Whining ahead] This seems, somehow, absurdly complicated. The score is or may be in three places: 1. On my Mac; 2. in my iCloud storage; 3. in Musescore's online storage. Separately deleting this from all three places seems quite an onerous punishment for having imported or created a score one no longer wants. Why isn't there a simple "Delete" button within the program? Or why can't I simply drag and drop into trash from within the program?

In reply to by tzotzo

The MuseScore application, very deliberately, has no way to delete a file. They decided that it's much better to make it complicated to delete a score than to be able to delete a score by mistake. And that's the reason you can't click a "Delete" button or drag and drop into trash from within the program.

Besides that, the three places you mentioned are three separate things, in three separate places. Even had the developers not made that decision, there would be no good way to delete all three of them with a single action. In particular, having the program (running locally on your computer) delete a file from the web (the musescore.com webpage, an entirely separate entity) would be somewhere between difficult and impossible. Also, deleting any one of them would leave you (the user) with a more complicated question: which one was deleted and which two do I need to delete manually?

In reply to by tzotzo

The score is or may be in three places

Let's make that four places. If you use the MuseScore menu option File > Import PDF..., then after the import there should be a file in .mscz format stored ready for you to download.

But in the Converted Files list I see only the Download option. There seems to be no option for a Delete of the entire row (PDF upload and .mscz conversion).
See: https://musescore.com/import

In reply to by DanielR

a) Well, that's not a file that is really of interest/concern to you. It's not taking up space on your hard drive, where the three locations that OP mentioned are. (Yes, the copy on musescore.com is not on your hard drive, but it's taking up space that you have some control over.)

b) Hunh! I had never thought of that. I assume (???) that after X amount of time that file will be deleted, but I've not done enough conversions to know. Does anybody actually know what happens to those files we upload to the conversion page???

In reply to by TheHutch

Yes, the copy on musescore.com is not on your hard drive...

Hmm... The handbook...
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/4/opening-and-saving-scores#Saving_a_…
says:
"Save to cloud... Saves score as a new file on musescore.com"
and that:
"Scores saved online (to the cloud) appear in the program’s Home: Scores tab with a cloud symbol at the corner of the file icon. A local copy is also automatically saved on your computer."

https://musescore.org/en/handbook/4/opening-and-saving-scores#Save_to_t…

In reply to by Jm6stringer

The local copy is not the copy stored on musescore.com. It's another copy of the file entirely.

So I think we're up to as many as five or six or seven copies of a given scorse. And that's more of the second reason I gave above (June 27, 2024 03:45) for why MuseScore doesn't have a button to delete the score.

In reply to by tzotzo

Probably the best thing is to
a) delete the file from your hard drive. This will probably remove it from the list automatically. (If not one of several different minor problems are happening, which must be resolved in one of several different ways.)
b) use the File / Open recent / Clear recent files option (all the way at the bottom of the "recent files" list) and clear the list completely.

In reply to by tzotzo

tzotzo,
My question would be "where did you see anything about three dot?"
And, indeed, you got a trove of odd answers to a very simple question. You asked how to delete a score. I think you added the PDF thing because you thought it might help. You didn't ask about recent scores or online scores, or anything of the sort. Then you asked why MuseScore can't delete a score. Good question. Sibelius can't delete a score, either. Word can. And others.
Scores save to where you got them from. If you save your scores in the MuseScore Scores folder, Then a SAVE will return it there. SAVE AS saves where you direct it. The recent files list has little to do with it.

As I first answered, You could go to the folder where you saved the file and delete it.

In reply to by tzotzo

@tzoto a score is just a file.
Deleting a score just means deleting that file, it can't be simpler than that.
Yes that file may have been saved locally or in the cloud, your choice when you saved it, and that's where the delete action needs to take place. But that's absolutely not absurd and is exactly the same for a MS-Word file, or an MS-Excel one,... Nothing specific to MuseScore in there.

In reply to by frfancha

Thanks for your help. What it seems to boil down is this: I must not blindly hit the "save" button but must rather consciously choose where to save the score (Save as ...) so that if I no longer want it, I only need to go to that one location to delete it. I appreciate everyone's patience with an old man who is just trying to make it ...

Incidentally bibjp, the suggestion to click the icon of the three vertical dots came from my web search of how to accomplish deleting a file in musescore. Perhaps that was a dated suggestion and that icon is not to be found in the latest version of musescore.

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.