Ambitus detecting cue notes

• Jul 17, 2015 - 18:04

I'm not sure if this is a bug, or if it should be put in Feature Requests, but here's the problem: When I put an ambitus at the beginning of any staff, it detects not only the notes in the part itself, but also the cue notes pasted into that staff from another which I have set in the inspector NOT to play. This results, for instance, in the ambitus for a cello/gamba part that looks like a house-painter's ladder, because it's detecting the high c's in the cue from the soprano recorder part, and showing them on the bass clef. Heh.

Is the ambitus supposed to detect ALL notes in a staff, or only those set to PLAY? If the former, I'd suggest that's a change that needs to be addressed.

BTW, I am aware that the use of an ambitus isn't usual for this type of music; I have no intention of publishing the score that way but I use it to save myself the trouble of scanning each staff by eye to determine the range required so I can make alternate suggestions for instrumentation in the 'performance notes' in the published edition.


Comments

Skipping notes set to not play seems like a nice feature request. Meanwhile, though, it's easy enough to overrule the automatically-detected defaults using the Inspector should you actually want to include the symbols. Doesn't help if you are jst using it as a quick-and-dirty weay of checking ranges, but maybe a plugin would be better suited to that purpose anyhow.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Okay, thanks. Should I repost this under Feature Requests or have you already taken 'judicial note' of that? ;o)

As for your last suggestion, you're going to have to educate me a bit. I am seriously 'plug-in illiterate'. Are plug-ins like the 'apps' my teenaged son is always talking about ('Duhhh, Dad! Why are you using that sand-glass to time your eggs? Don't you know there's an App for that....')?

PS--I've given up on using workarounds to keep part-cues from showing up in the score. Too much trouble for not enough result, at least for now. But I'm curious to know if there has been any progress towards creating an actual cue function that will automatically set cues in small notes that don't play (and are excluded from ambitus scanning) and offer an option to let them show or not in the score itself.

In reply to by Recorder485

In order to get logged permanently in a place where it won't get lost, you should use the Issue tracker (link in menu at right of this page), or use "Help / Report a Bug" from within MuseScore, and select "feature request" from the "Category" drop-down menu.

An "app" is slang for "application", which is another word for computer program". So MuseScore is an app. It's just that typically, we use the full word "application" or "computer program" if runs on a "regular" computer and "app" if it runs on a phone.

A "plugin" is an something added on to a computer program that enables it to do something it couldn't do right out of the box. Only certain programs have a way to add plugins, but MuseScore is one of them. And it would, I think, be very easy for someone to write a range check plugin. If such a plugin were added, you'd just have to download it from the place on this site where plugins can be downloaded from (currently under construction still, it seems) and then magically it would appear in the Plugins menu from within MuseScore, ready for you to run just as if it had actually come with the program.

As for a dedicated cue function such as you have described, no, I don't think anyone has been working on that. It is the sort of thing that might possibly be looked at for 2.1 or some release after that, though.

Pull Request with a fix pushed to github: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/2129 In due time, it will presumably find its way into the master code.

As cue notes, as far as I know, are not categorized as such in the programme, I decided to rely on the note play flag: notes which are not played (Play check box turned off in the Inspector) are no longer taken into account for the ambitus range.

M.

P.S.: in my experience, cue notes are mainly used in separate parts of long and/or complex scores and, while implementing ambitus, I didn't anticipate them being used in scores of this kind; anyway, it seems to me a totally reasonable request and, furthermore, very simple to implement. So, here it is (well, here it will be sooner or later!)

In reply to by Miwarre

Thank you. Every time you people do this--I mean, actually FIX something within 24 hours or so--I am amazed all over again.

We have become inured by Corporate culture to beating our heads against the firewall known as 'customer service' (hah!). An example would be my silly and admittedly Quixotic attempt to get PDF Complete to modify their code so an image can be rotated incrementally instead of only by 90 degrees. (I want to print a gift copy of a scan of Hawkins--all 2500+ pages!--and some pages weren't scanned squarely.) It can't be that hard to do; numerous image editors include that ability, and there's GOT to be at least one live human being buried somewhere in that corporate morass who could write/insert/modify the code. But no--After a week of e-mailing back and forth, the total semantic content of my discussion with PDF Complete can be summed up as: "Thank you for contacting us. I can't fix your problem, I can't answer your questions, and I can't put you in touch with anyone who can. Is there anything else I can do for you today?"

But MuseScore gives me hope. Thank you again.

======

PS--The scores in which I insert cues for the instrumental parts tend to be full-length solo concerti from the late Baroque through the pre-classical. As I'm sure you know (just stating this for the benefit of users less familiar with the repertoire), in works of this sort the soloists--and often enough the inner voices (in particular the 2nd violins and violas)--can find themselves sitting there looking handsome for 16, 24, or 32 bars at a stretch while the theme is stated or recapped by someone else. In that the small ensembles for which I make my arrangements and transcriptions rarely have a dedicated conductor, I add two- or three-measure cues after any silence longer than 10 measures. It's a bit more effort on my part, but it doesn't cost any more to print. ;o)

In reply to by Recorder485

Given your enthusiasm for MuseScore, I would like to make clear that the fix is NOT included yet. I submitted the patch for inclusion: the core devs constantly review these submission and, if nobody notices some error or trouble, it will be merged into the master code (usually within some days).

From this point, the fix is available to everybody in the nightly version (for everybody bold enough to use a nightly version, I mean!) and it will appear in the release programme at the next next released.

M.

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