Working space - possible feature

• Aug 31, 2024 - 10:42

I noticed that Finale [now moribund ..] has a feature for extracting notes from chords.

This is useful for extracting lines fo play on other instruments from a piano score.

Almost the same functionality can be achieved in MuseScore by using the Explode feature.

If a chord has N notes, then use N [possibly N+1] blank staves. Copy the section to be expanded into the top stave, then use explode, and the staves below will then be populated with the notes from each chord in order.

Often these staves can then be copied - for example into a brass section, or a vocal section.

With some awareness, the explode operation can be done in place directly into the section to receive the exploded notes.

However sometimes it is better to put extra staves into the main scores in order to do these operations.

It also doesn't work quite so well if the stave with the chords contains multiple MuseScore voices.

A way to make this more palatable might be to have a subsidiary workspace tool - a set of additional staves used only for temporary work. This would avoid having to create extra work space in the main score, and possibly having to do a later tidying up operation.

Has this idea been suggested before? Indeed it might be useful to allow more than one such temporary work space - each one named - so that future changes and modifications could be easier.


Comments

In reply to by graffesmusic

Thanks - but this is an area which probably needs reexamination and a revamp - IMO.

Finale seemed to do things like this rather well - but I never used that. I think MuseScore could do well too, and most of the components to make it happen are probably already in place.

If I were doing this manually I'd probably use a separate few sheets of score paper, but that's pointless if it can be done on a computer, and much more rapidly and more accurately. Using auxiliary sheets reduces user cognitive load so it does make sense to have auxiliary workspaces just for this.

Of course to an extent this can be done by opening another MU4 file, and doing the extra work there, but at the moment at least MU4 doesn't seem to work particularly well with multiple files open - certainly not on Apple kit. It does work, but the issues are that the user loses almost all sense of which files are actually open.

In reply to by bobjp

May well be easier. I prefer Apple, but this is an area - particularly with this software, where things just don't work out so well always. I can have multiple files open in MU4 - that's not a problem, but the difficulties arise in switching from one score to another. That seems to cause the windows to shuffle around, so that the score you want to copy from or to disappears or gets covered with another window. Then it takes a while to find it again, though I now know how to do that quite quickly. Then the whole window business has to be done over to get back to the alternate score. That really slows things down drastically.

Since Finale is going away [I never had it or used it] I looked at some Finale videos. This one has some neat features - and some of the ideas could maybe be incoporated into MuseScore.

https://youtu.be/hjxpKra1sdU?si=HBOvmbYTCkH-BjSO

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