Multiple Repeats

• Jun 29, 2020 - 05:13

It would be nice for the next version of musecore if the user would be allowed to repeat a section by however many times they desire. Perhaps an extra right-end side of the measure repeat dots could be selected that looks identical except it gives the number of repeats the user wants. The user clicks on it, drags it to the measure they want the repeat dots to be, and a GUI box comes up that asks for the number of times the section is to be repeated. Afterwards, put a "X4" over the repeat dots above the measure if the user wants it to be repeated 4 times, or whatever number they enter so there is a visual connection and it's obvious to other musicians.

Right now it's annoying if you are using the program for playback and writing for contemporary styles of music like metal where you write a riff that lasts for multiple bars where you want it to repeat, say, 8 times, you have to copy and paste it multiple times to get the playback to sound the song out how you want. Having an option like this could make things more compact so I get the benefits of the sheet music notation, and also annoy me less.


Comments

In reply to by LONG_LIVE_DA_S…

While there is room for improvement, an issue is that in most cases, you don't actually need or want text to appear - the numbers on voltas tell the story already. And in the cases where there are no voltas, you have to consider what language you want the text to appear in, also whether the text appears at the start or end, etc. So while easier to discover is nice, we can't depend too much on automation as there are many variables involved.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

What Jo-Jo suggest is the preferable solution in my eyes.

In a classical music context it would be not very much needed, indeed. As Marc said.

But in different styles, especially in pop/rock music, multiple repeats of 4 or 8 bar structures without voltas are rather the norm than the exception. A "3x", "4x" would be the standard to use here, no language problem at all. (I would have less work to do to occasionally make those invisible [which would anyhow rarely happen if voltas prevent it] than to always produce them manually, which in a pop style Score is more often needed than not.

In reply to by sprock

Agreed, but just to be clear - you did see that you can easily get the playback effect already in measure properties, right? Having this be automatically deduced from text would be nice someday too, as it would save a few seconds here and there, but it's quite not a problem to get this result already.

In reply to by sprock

My trick here is to use a plain "Text Line" attached to the measure, then turn off the line visibility of it as well as the Begin Text. Instead turn on the "End text" and make that the "3x" or whichever you need.

That way seems quite stable against measure widths changing due to layout changes.

In reply to by sprock

It's not totally clear what you mean - a sample score would help. But I'm kind of guessing you mean, you want the 3X or whatever to appear over the end repeat as opposed to start repeat, and therefore simply attaching to the first note of the measure won't do, and attaching to the last note is questionable because that last note could be different distance from the barline depending in duration, stretch, etc.

The line approach is one possibility. Another interesting hack would be to add as repeat text - like a Fine, or DS. You can fiddle with the playback properties to make sure it doesn't mess up playback (e.g., setting type to Custom).

In principle, there is no reason we couldn't someday support adding staff text (or other types of text) to barlines. Until a few months ago, we didn't support adding symbols to barlines, but we added that in part to help multimeasure repeats work better.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

No, just NO! I don't see any playback numbers or even properties on the repeat bar or the measure properties. All I get is appearance properties on the repeat bar and in the measure playback properties, only velocity and tuning! I cannot get the repeat measure to correctly go from the last (4th) repeat, to the 4th ending no matter how I try to edit the volta settings! The docs are just wrong!

In reply to by BrionBell

Can you explain what you mean in more detail? If you attach your score and describe specifically might measures you mean and what you have tried, we can understand and assist better. The documentation is correct, but it could be you are misinterpreting some aspect of it, or didn't see some portion of it that would be relevant for your case. Once we see your score as can advise further.

I would like to write in 4 repeats with the final one having a different last measure ending.
I find the solution already exists.

After selecting the line, the INSPECTOR allows me to change the text (number) so it was easy to just do so and change a 1. into 1. 2. 3. and then for the ending change the 1. to a 4.

Playback isn't really an issue as I could just create a copy of the score and write it out as it is to be played.

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