Tuplet bracket position

• Jan 17, 2010 - 23:01
Type
Functional
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Status
closed
Project
MuseScore

Alfred's Essential Dictionary of Music Notation recommends that tuplet brackets begin flush left with the first note head (or rest) and end flush right with the last note head. This style recommendation is confirmed by the examples shown in Standard Music Notation Practice (see attached) and the default behavior of both Finale and Sibelius.

MuseScore and LilyPond start and end the bracket at the note stem instead of flush with the note head. However MuseScore's implementation is buggy because this style has a number of exceptions that MuseScore does not cater for (presumably LilyPond does cater for the exceptions but I have not tested it throughly. Adopting Alfred's recommendations would solve the bugs listed below without added complexity to the code because the single rule applies more universally. It also puts MuseScore inline with (what seems to be) the predominate practice.

Bugs that would be solved by adopting Alfred's recommendations:

Comments

• Jan 20, 2010 - 23:24
Status (old) fixed ⇒ active

For beamed tuplets (i.e. no bracket) then the tuplet numeral should be centered on the beam. This is mentioned in Alfred (p.115) but I missed it since it wasn't in the section about brackets. I guess it would have been too easy to have no exceptions :)

For what it is worth Sibelius 6 follows Alfred's recommendations for this special case. My copy of Finale 2007 does not (it matches the current behavior of MuseScore SVN). However, it looks odd to me when the tuplet numeral is not centered over the beam.

I don't have a lot of reference materials with me right now, so feel to fill in or contradict.

Attachment Size
beamed tuplet off-center.png 14.18 KB

Reply

• Jan 22, 2010 - 18:35

The number only tuplet is rendered by simply omitting the brackets. This was ok for the old bracket positions but looks bad now for numbers only. Guess its a new special case :-)

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