XML has incomplete voices - very hard to get rid of in MuseScore

• Nov 30, 2016 - 00:11

Marc says. "Dragging rests off-screen is a definite no-no in any version of MuseScore. In order to understand why these rests are there and how you would need to fix it, we'd need you to start another thread and post the score you are having trouble with (probably the MusicXML file itself would be most useful)."

So here I am. I'll attach an example XML. It was output by SharpEye 2

I can improve it some using the Selection Filter (Explode/Implode doesn't help - it works on Chords not Voices) But that means copying to a whole new score. OK, might be an alternative! NOTE: there is no "Select All" or "Revert" button on the Selection Filter, AND it doesn't reset when you close it - bit tedious clicking all those little buttons!

SharpEye doesn't adhere to strict format rules (they say so that you can edit anything you want) but it does mean that the output may cause problems in MuseScore - which does enforce rules. Hmmm. Might be nice to be able to abandon the rules as an option? Once we have the music the way we want it, if we could turn off the format checking and delete the last few extra rests/notes, that would work. See SharpEye doesn't include the WHOLE of voice 2 - If you switch to V2 you will see that you can't select anything before the 3rd bar. You should also find places where you can't delete just the one voice. I usually insert a blank bar and re-type those.

This is not a huge problem and since I am only using Fake Book Lead Sheets, my music just has to print out right - it doesn't have to be accurate. That's why it works to just drag the extra rests to the very bottom of the screen!!

Attachment Size
Candle in The Wind.xml 93.31 KB

Comments

For the record, Implode *does* work on voices, to some extent - only if the rhythms are compatible.

I'm not sure which rests you are finding problematic. There are definitely uses of multiple voices that are consistent with how a human arranger would have likely put this together; I guess SharpEye didn't do a very good job of assigning voices. But instead of just dragging things around - which will leave you with incorrect irregular spacing or require further manual adjustment -to yield good results for print - it is far better to use MuseScore to actually fix the errors introduced by SharpEye. Thern the layout will be correct with no need for manual adjustment.

For example, not sure what measure 25 was supposed to look like, but I'm pretty sure it isn't what you see here. It just needs to be fixed, not patched up cosmetically. Measure 3 on the other hand has a reason set of notes as far as I can tell, but SharpEye seems to have assigned things to voices backwards from what it probably should have. Run Edit / Voices / Exchange voice 1-2 and you get better results. Either way, though, there is no rest that needs to be moved off the page - the unnecessary rest is already marked invisible. Similar for measure 7.

Not sure what is going on with measure 41-42, those probably need more work. Again, I'd need to know how they were *supposed* to look to avise further.

Anyhow, if you can explain what specifically you are trying to do here that causes you to resort to moving rests off the page, I can explain what the correct solution would be instead. Maybe pick one particular measure, show how the original sheet music looked, explain how you are trying to patch it up, and I'll show how to fix it for real.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

OK, I never noticed that the grayed out stuff doesn't print any more - it used to at some point.

Measure 25? I just can't count that low:^) Measure 41 just seems to have extra notes, BUT I am able to just delete them!! 42 looks to be "right" but the voices are swapped again.

Just looks like a very tedious job to correct it, even on this small piece.

You might notice that SharpEye isn't good at Lyrics and doesn't pick up all of the Chords. But what it does do well is read the printed OUTPUT from MuseScore. So if I can get this to print correctly, it is quite easy to re-scan it and get a good result. (Before I correct all the Lyrics and Chords). I don't have a bottle of White-Out so the extra stems, etc. cause a problem for me.

What I would REALLY like to be able to do is:- select measure(s), tell MuseScore to let me change what I want to in EACH measure, and then continue - with OR without automatic formatting.

I am sure that creates all kinds of problems so I would be happy just to be able to opt out of automatic formatting. I don't care if it re-instates itself when I open the file again, but other users might.

And as an aside, who picked blue and green for voice 1 & 2?? That's very hard to see - and I am nowhere near colour-blind!!!

Thanks Marc, Once again I appreciate all your work on this.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Monitor calibration can have a lot to do with it. Different monitors reproduce color differently. It's been requrest before that we give some control over these colors, and I'm OK with that.

It's definitely true that invisible notes show gray and don't print and that this has always been the case. It's possible, however, you were looking at a score that had *actual* gray notes. Not notes that were made invisible and thus appeared gray, but fully visible notes that were set to grey using the Inspector (or note properties in earlier versions).

In reply to by franksk

It is true that if a piece has many errors, you will need to fix them, and that can be tedious. But MuseScore provides the tools to allow you to do so and get great-looking results. You already *can* change what you want in each measure than then continue. Not sure what you mean about turning off "automatic formatting". Surely you don't want to manually draw and fill in each notehead, manually attach each stem and set its direction and length, manually decide which notes to beam together and what the beam angle should be, manually decide how much space to leave before and after each note, manually decide how wide each measure should be, manually adjust each note as you add a lyric to prevent overlap, and so on. It would take ages to to get a readable score that way. It is precisely the fact that you *don't* have to do all that formatting manually - the fact that MuseScore takes care of all that and much more completely automatically - that *eliminates* most of the tediousness of editing a score to get great-looking results. If the music entered correctly, it will automatically *look* correct. So if the music contains errors, the best solution is not to try to manually force the incorrect music to look as if it were correct - the solution to make the music correct and the formatting takes care of itself. It's much easier *and* you get much better results as well.

So let's try to be more specific. Name a specific measure you want to fix, show a picture or give a clear description of how you'd like it to be, and I'm happy to show exactly how to get that effect.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Musescore is a very complete and complex tool. And I know that I can probably get it to do anything that I wish BUT it has taken me about 8 years so far and because I am only doing Fake Book format, it is only worth me learning so much. I DO have a license for SharpEye and that gives me other alternatives. I usually get a fairly good result, quite quickly - if I re-scan. Experience with BOTH packages helps. But every once in a while I am scanning a poor copy or it's just too complicated - so I am quite happy to re-scan it on those occasions.

You sound like you are full-time on this, but realise that for most of us it is a couple of hours here and there, And for me, several weeks every year or so. I gave up on LilyPond - learning Jedit to modify a .ly output file was too much because it is ALSO only one, very small part of the software I deal with on a daily basis.

Yes, those rests DID print - it's been a while (you know, you get into a habit as you learn!) So nice to see that they don't anymore and thank you for pointing that out. And I will try making stuff invisible in future, now I now that I can do that.

By formatting I simply mean that when I add or delete a note, it affects all following measures. That's not always logical. e.g. I may want to replace it with something else but the notes have already re-formatted and I may not even be able to make sense of that anymore. A simpler solution has been to INSERT a measure or two and re-enter - then delete the old measures. AND WHO SAYS I must always have 4 beats just 'cause it's 4/4?

The other problem that comes up quite a bit is automatically changing the Key Signature! We end up with extraneous key signatures in the middle of lines and they cannot be deleted because that changes all following measures again.

As with anything in life, sometimes it would just be nice to do what you want and get on with life!!!

Speaking of which.......

Thanks again Marc. I will take another look at the documentation to see if there is anything I can pick up and improve my expertise, and I will be back if I find anything else that I think might be useful to figure out or fix.

In reply to by franksk

Again, in order to help, we'd need you to post a specific example and a clear description of what you are trying to do. Changing a note in one measure does *not* normally affect any notes in any subsequent measures. It seems you have some specific case in mind where somehow something went wrong, but again, in order to understand and help, we'd need to see a *specific* example.

I also don't know what you mean about key signatures - again, we'd need a specific example to understand. It's possible an erroneous MusicXML file might introduce spurious key changes into a score, so perhaps you are seeing a score with such a problem, but we can't advise without seeing the specific example and understanding what you are trying to do. Normally this too just works.

As for having four beats in a measure, if you have some special reason (eg, pickup measure, cadenza, whatever) to want a different number of beats in a 4/4 measure, that's easy - right click, Measure Properties, set the actual duration however you like.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Changing notes - BOY, glad that's fixed!!!! That's absolutely the first time I have added a note and it hasn't run over into the next measure! It still overflows the end of the measure but that's a HUGE improvement.

Most times I have found a way to fix stuff so I am digging thru' the archives to find examples for you. However, try this one. There are numerous extraneous key symbols and I can't delete them BECAUSE THEY ACTUALLY DON'T EXIST! Count the measures - which measure are they in?

And try deleting the sharp in Measure 50!

4/4? just being silly!

Oh, Here's another one that has an extra time signature after measure 17.

Please remember that most of my experience has been with older versions. I was slow to change to 2.3 Mostly because it is not backwards compatible. I'm sure there are a lot like me that wait till we know the software is solid before upgrading and the compatibility thing makes us delay further. (just a thought)

In reply to by franksk

Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean when you say you are "glad that's fixed". I wasn't describing something that has changed recently; it's *always* been the case that edits to one measure don't affect others. The only time adding a note to one measure would run into the next would be if you in fact *entered* a note that doesn't fit in the current measure (eg, trying to put a whole notes on beat 4, which makes no musical sense). So again, if you are having a specific problem in this area, we'd really need to see a specific score and precise steps to reproduce the problem.

As for the examples you did provide:

In American Pie, I do see a whole lot of spurious key changes that SharpEye apparently created, going back and forth between G and C when it should presumably stay in G. I am furthermore guessing that you are attempting to delete the *courtesy* key signature that is correctly and automatically added at the end of the *previous* system, rather than dealing with the *actual* key change which occurs at the *beginning* of a system. You are more or less on the right track to observe that the courtesy key signatures at the ends of the systems "actually don't exist". They *do* exist, but they aren't the real change - the real change is at the beginning of the enxt system, according to standard rules of notation. The courtesy changes are automatically generated (again, according to standard rules of notation) only if the measure before the key change occurs at the end of a system. So, again don't delete those, you need to fix the *actual* key change at the start of the next system.

Deleting the actual key change is easy enough for the changes from C to G - select the actual key change at the beginning of measure 38 (for example), press delete. This automatically removes the courtesy change at the end of the previous system as well. However, for the changes from G to C, there is nothing there at the beginning of next system to select in order to press delete, so instead, simply *replace* that with a G major key signature.

Rather than fix each of these errors one at a time, however, a much easier way would be to do them all at once. Lots of ways to do this, here's one: right click the initial key signature, Select / All Similar Elements, then Ctrl+click that initial key signature to deselect it while leaving the others all selected. Hit Delete, and everything is in G major as it should be.

As for the extra time signature in "Mrs. Crandall", you can delete that by simply selecting it and pressing Delete. Changing time signatures removes line breaks because the barlines they were originally attached to no longer exist after a time signature change, but you can simply add them back.

Back to the original topic of voices:

Also of this said, it is definitely the case that while MuseScore provides powerful tools for editing scores, most of those tools are optimized for correcting the sorts of mistakes people make entering scores themselves or for changing their mind about how to notate something - changing from one correct notation to a *different* correct notation. Softeware like SharpEye often produces scores that are pretty whacked out, filled with more numerous and more serious errors than the sorts of things that otherwise happen normally. I can certainly see that correcting a score created by SharpEye would be an adventure. So it is definitely worth showing some of these sorts of examples in a feedback session - assuming you are still up for doing that - and hopefully that can help give us ideas for how to further optimize the editing tools to handle these more extreme situations.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Oh, I was actually able to delete that Time Sig. by select/right-click/cut. Doesn't work on the key sig. in the 1st piece though.

And notice that if you add a sharp on the next line (measure 53) it will got away. BUT MuseScore RE-FORMATS everything after that - and I am not sure that that is appropriate! F natural in 54??? Who knows!

In reply to by franksk

If you check measure 54, you will see that it is *already* an F natural, because the key signature at that point has no flats or sharps. So it was already an F natural, and it stays F natural unless you change it. Changing the key signature does *not* change any notes already present - and in most cases, you wouldn't want it to. SharpEye entered an F natural, and MuseScore assumes you want to *keep* it an F natural even if you decide to alter the key signature. Which is to say, it very explicitly does *not* try to "reformat" or make any other unnecessary changes to your score. The notes you (or SharpEye) entered stay exactly as they were. If you want to change those notes, you will need to ask MuseScore to do so - it won't change them unnecessarily without your explicit instruction to do so.

One way to get MuseScore to change all notes *not* in the key into notes that *are* in the key would be to select the passage, Alt+Shift+Up to transpose everything diatonically up a step, then Alt+Shift+Down to transpose everything diatonically down a step.

In reply to by franksk

But that's just the point - it *isn't adjusting the following measures. That note started out as an F, and after the change you made to the previous measure, it *remains* an F. What you want is a new command that *does* automatically adjust the following the measures, changing F's into F#'s. It's not an unreasonable request at all, worth submitting officially to the issue tracker. But in doing so, it was be important to be clear about what you asking: you want MuseScore to *start* adjusting subsequent measures in order to change the pitches of notes already entered. As I mentioned, in the normal workflow this would *not* usually be desired. So this would have to be a new command, not a change to how the existing one works.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Had a look at the XML for Candle in the wind, to check if MuseScore imports it correctly.

Measures 3, 6, 7, 25 and 42 are indeed imported correctly, what you see in MuseScore is exactly what is in the file produced by SharpEye.

Measure 41 is a complex set of notes in different voices jumping backwards and forward through the measure, making it difficult to follow. On first guess I still think it is imported correctly. Note that there is no chord in this measure, the two "chords" are actually same-pitched notes at the same time in different voices.

Summarising: the file is imported correctly by MuseScore. How to easily fix it using MuseScore is a different question ...

A few comments about SharpEye for those who have never used it - or perhaps never heard of it...

I have used SharpEye optical music recognition intensively during the past three years, to import over 50 out-of-print works. Then I use SharpEye to export a MusicXML file, for import into MuseScore.

overall I have been very pleased with the accuracy of the SharpEye recognition engine. But I always have to edit the SharpEye file rigorously to remove what SharpEye calls "rhythm errors". So I always ensure that SharpEye reports zero errors before I generate the MusicXML file.

Typical causes for a rhythm error are:
a) a rest is missing in one of the voices on a stave
b) SharpEye got the duration of a note wrong (e.g. crotchet instead of quaver)
c) a random symbol has wrongly been recognized as a note
d) SharpEye failed to recognize a change of time signature

In those rare cases where SharpEye has a real problem (and causes a real problem for MuseScore), I simply delete the contents of that specific bar from the SharpEye score before exporting as MusicXML. It's easy enough to insert the notes again in MuseScore after importing the MusicXML file.

In reply to by DanielR

Yeah, SharpEye has extensive editing capabilities and the authors expected you to correct ALL errors before exporting. (You DO have to correct rhythm errors!) However, MuseScore has a MUCH BETTER graphical interface and is much better at editing chord symbols. And Sharpeye really doesn't help you with lyrics.

So one is SEDUCED into editing in MuseScore!!

Most of my errors in SharpEye come from
a) badly aligned scanning (need to be VERY accurate)
b) Bad original (maybe copy or hand-drawn symbols)
c) Scanning from a book

Re-scanning printouts from MuseScore have been VERY successful.

The other trick I have used is to scan one line at a time - since I am only interested in the top stave anyway. This produces a much better result than deleting unwanted stuff in SharpEye. A bit tedious but actually saves a lot of time in the end.

P.S. SharpEye do not UPDATE their software - last release was 2006!

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