Arranging bars evenly across the page

• Dec 18, 2010 - 18:55

Much as I hate to mention the terrible Finale here (the company took my money but never resolved a bug with Intel Macs - so I never got proper working registration - worst customer service I ever encountered - anywhere, ever........... and relax)...

One thing Finale could do (when it deigned to work at all) was to allow you to pull or move the bar-lines about on the staves so you could have, say, four bars to a line, or no stretched bars at the end, or none hanging off the end of the page or whatever else you wanted.

I'm sure the Wonderful MuseScore can do this, but I can't seem to find out how.

Thanks

Tom

Comments

• Dec 18, 2010 - 20:13

I'm not sure to understand what you want. There are several possibilities.
If you want 4 measures on a line, you can put a line break (See Break or spacer ). If it's not enough, you can select bars and shrink them with Layout -> Add less stretch. You can do this several time. Using the shortcut "{" can be handy.
The last system is a little bit special. MuseScore uses the threshold defined in Style -> Edit general style-> Page -> Last system threshold to decide if it should be span on the whole width or not. If the music you entered is over the threshold, the last system is spanned evenly. Hope it helps.

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• Dec 18, 2010 - 23:44

I know you want more than this but, as a partial work around, you can go to >Style>Edit General Style>System, and there you can set a global number of bars per staff for the piece. It would be great if an option to exclude the first staff was added, but the ability to just drag the bars to the proper configuration would be an even greater convenience.

Regards,

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• Dec 19, 2010 - 15:40

Ah - thanks guys. I'd tried using the line break command, obviously, but for some reason it didn't work.

Looking MUCH better now!

Two things I've not been able to sort out though...

One is when adding chord text - I've found the sharp symbol on the keyboard palette, but when I type 'ALT 3' on my mac, which usually produces a hash, thus # (see, it did it here), nothing happens.

What is the keyboard command in MSc for # on a mac, please.

Also, in trad dances, rather than bothering with 1st time and 2nd time voltas, one convention is just to put the leading notes of the B Part in brackets (so you know not to play them till you're leaving the previous part). Is there a way of putting notes in brackets in MSc? I've had a look but not found anything.

Thanks

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• Dec 20, 2010 - 11:52

That's great re the brackets thanks, but [Shift @] just does an @ on my Mac - (well, of course it's really [Shift 2] - because @ is on the 2 key).

I've tried all the [Shift +], [Alt +] and [Shift/Alt] + combinations.

None of them produce # in MSc - though [Alt 3] does in every other programme I own, including, obviously, this post.

Tom

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• Dec 20, 2010 - 14:48

No that hasn't worked at all, I'm afraid.

I found the # - it was undefined.

So I changed 'Enter a Third Above' to a different shortcut, then set # to be [Alt 3].

But when I try to enter a # against a chord letter, nothing happens.

I can't think why # - which you're bound to need when entering chords - should not be a default shortcut.

Can anyone explain why?

Thanks

Tom

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• Dec 20, 2010 - 20:04

I don't think it's reasonable for people to have to change layouts just for MuseScore - I'm in and out all the time between Word and Protools and all sorts of other programs. Bonkers, that would be.

Re-mapping would be fine if it worked. But it doesn't. All the usable keys are already defined for something else, and re-mapping those doesn't work either.

I'm compromising by using an asterisk in the short term, then using the Z palette to change the stars to hashes later. But it's poor - the first real issue I've encountered with MSc.

Tom

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