Number of bars per staff

• Oct 23, 2014 - 19:03

Can't get the number of bars per staff to work reliably. Some staves are only one bar long. I can stretch my way around this, but . . . Something else may be set to a value that forbids a global solution. Love MuseScore, but this seems hard to work around. Thanks.

Attachment Size
Sooner or Later You're Everyone.mscz 10.87 KB

Comments

From looking at the score, there's only 4 measures (2 on page 3, 2 on page 4) that take one staff each. I suspect it's a combination of number of amount of lyrics and number of notes. I selected the two on page 3, did a shift-{ and they combined into one right away. The page 4 set took a few shift-{ to shrink. To me that's quite normal. Everything else seemed OK.

In reply to by adamgroden

How can you fix anything to a specific measure count per line when the amount of lyrics or number of notes prevents this? Stretch/shrink can only work so far and MuseScore won't make any adjustments like that for you. Besides, the feature "fix number of measures" is bad and shouldn't be used except under very specific circumstances. Too many people get caught using it thinking it's some magic solution. There has been recent discussion about removing it and using the "Break every x measures" plugin instead.

In reply to by adamgroden

I agree that fixing the measures is mostly of no use.

If you did fix this piece at 5 measures per line and used the same size notes and font for your lyric it would look like the attached.

There are a few things you can do to still have big, readable text but keep the page numbers down but it does take a bit of effort (although if you're doing it often enough you get used to it). You can adjust the distance from barline to notes (reduce it to 0.8, say) and from notes to barline. You can reduce the distance between staves. You can reduce the space above and below lyrics. There will come a point, though, where an extra page makes more sense. One thing I wouldn't do is reduce the Music Bottom Margin to 2.0 as your score has since this just makes for difficulties such as covering the date or copyright text and it also also means that the music is obscured when you turn a page.

Attachment Size
Sooner or Later You're Squashed.mscz 13.26 KB

In reply to by underquark

I can't open your attachment. It tells me to upgrade, but I'm using 3.1. Also, using the Break Every X Measures puts the little break mark every x measures, but the number of measures per staff gets weird. Also, when I sometimes stretch measures, other measures show up with the bar line OFF the staff completely. Hey I appreciate this. You I mean.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

"Not sure why underquark did that?"

My mistake as I should have used 1.3 and saved it in that format.

It's because I built 2.0 Beta from source and my system defaults to opening all MS scores in the new version. As 2.0 is already working very well for me I didn't notice. Anyway, Jo-jo, your version still has the "Music Bottom Margin" too small (2.0) IMHO. It can be increased to 7.0, still fit everything in and allow a fat thumb to turn the page without obscuring anything.

In reply to by adamgroden

The score was presumably created with the 2.0 Beta or Nightly build - a preview of the 2.0 release to come. WHat you have is 1.3 - the current version, but indeed, it won't be able to open scores created in 2.0 Beta/Nightly.

Break Every X Measures will insert breaks as advertised, but it's still up to you to choose a sdmall enough staff size or reduce stretch enough to fit everything. Zit's pretty much exactly as putting a line break in text in a word processor. You can put a line break anywhere you like, but putting a line break after say 100 characters won't force those first 100 characters to all fit on one line. It will still fit only as many charcaters per line as fit given you page size and font setting. So the line break may well interrupt a line in the middle somewhere. it's exactly the same with MsueScore. You can put a break in to force a line break to happen, but if you want to *also* forces some number of previous measures to fit on a s ginle line, that's totally separate, and you need to make that happen the same way you would with a word processor - by making the page bigger or the music smaller.

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