[1.0] and [trunk] Equal spacing of beamed notes

• Feb 22, 2011 - 18:30

Hi,

current MuseScore versions try hard to horizontally align notes in different staves so that notes occurring at the same time are aligned. This is usually good. Except one case:

When a group of notes are beamed together, they should be equally spaced inside the beam group regardless of what happens in other staves.

An example is attached, showing a fragment with 2 staves, once as MuseScore formats it by default leaving horizontal 'gaps' between beamed notes (marked by red arrows) and then as it should look (obtained by manual adjusting note heads; not perfect but better).

Having those gaps has 2 cons:

1) It looks ugly (score cleanliness is not simply aesthetics, it makes the score easier to play from!)

2) It makes the player to stutter a little bit, asking himself things like: "what is the reason of this extra space? Did I overlooked a dot? Would a (missing?) dot fit the measure?" and so on (at least, it happens to me). Quite inconvenient.

I also kind of remember that the "good old rules" of music engraving recommend equal spacing of beamed groups (I don't have a reference at hand, though).

I do not think it would be overly complex to fix this layout aspect: once the horizontal position of the first and the last note of the group have been determined, it is a matter of dividing the distance by the number of notes - 1.

Thanks,

M.

Attachment Size
EqualSpacingOfBeamedNotes.png 22.23 KB

Comments

It _is_ complex and does not work the way you presume. What about accidentals in a tight layout? Or clef changes in the beam, sub-beams, beams crossing barlines etc. ? I also doubt the rule of equal spacing of beamed notes. I can show a lot of examples for piano were its not done. Instead notes playing at the same time are always vertical aligned. If not you will have serious problems in reading this scores.

What i see in your example is a different deficiency of the MuseScore layout algorithm. The grace notes do not make good use of the available space. If they did, the spacing of the beamed notes below would be equal. A similar problem exists with tuplets which are sometimes not equal spaced when they could.

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