New features in the nightly builds

• Oct 29, 2015 - 18:25

As the result of a quick reunion in Germany together with Werner and Thomas, several new features have been merged into master and so now appears in nightly builds. First, a selfie or it didn't happen.

Team meetup in Germany

There were 67 open pull requests two days ago. We merged 29, and closed or sorted for later several others. Most of the PR were about bug fixes but some implements new features. While we are into numbers, MuseScore has been written by 64 contributors as of today. Thanks to all of them!

What's new?

Instrument change now honors instrument transposition

Marc Sabatella implemented this feature. When adding an instrument change to a measure, if the instrument is a transposing instrument, the notes will be transposed accordingly. You should now be able to write this new jazz tune more easily and get the flutist picks a clarinet right in the middle.

Temporary and Cutaway staff

Again by Marc Sabatella. It's now possible to make all the empty measure of a staff invisible. It's a new property in Staff Properties dialog called "Cutaway". It's also possible to hide one empty staff while keeping the other empty staff. It's done in Staff Properties > Hide when empty > Always. Combining "Hide when empty / Always" and "Cutaway" gives you a simple but effective ossia.

Capture d'écran 2015-10-29 19.24.29.png

Midi channel and port are customizable per instrument

Igevorse implemented this feature this summer, as part of Google summer of code, under the umbrella of the Portland State University. It will have the bigger impact if you use MuseScore with JACK since it enables to choose precisely which channel and which port an instrument will send midi events to. In JACK it makes it easy to route a given instrument to a given VSTi for example. Note that this feature being quite specialized, it's hidden by default. You need to enable it in Preferences > Score > View for now.

Better support of historical tablature, in particular beams

Maurizio "Miwarre" Gavioli worked on tablature support and my guess is that MuseScore is quickly becoming the most complete open source tablature editor. The latest improvement is the ability to mix beam and normal figures in historical tablatures.


Better support of 2 and 3 lines staves

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Lots of other fixes

From a new shortcut for sforzato accent (Shift+V) to better control of dashes in lyrics or better glissando editing, there is a lot more to test in nightlies! Pick your favorite new features and test it.

Feedback is welcome on the Tech Preview forum. You can download a nightly from the download page. Keep in mind that files created with the nightlies might not open correctly in MuseScore 2.0.X nor in a future nightly or released version!


Comments

other things for suggestions :

1) Enable/disable (solo, exclude, etc.) audio track on the fly ... mixer form is not very fast or to have mixer form docktable on the rigth of the main window for example ..
OR using popup menù for every staff !!

2) insert/delete/modify notes and other object in free hand mode

3) voices (1,2,3,4) manipulating is not very easy

THANK YOU and happy musescore :)

I have tried the new features nightly builds. They are so nice, in special honoring transpositions for mid-staff instrument changes. Thanks, Marc Sabatella! I have a suggestion on that. There could be a field in the dialog box "select Instrument" for changing staff abbreviated name.

In reply to by mtuliosax

I was actually hoping to make this work automatically. Unfortunately, due to a quirk in how these staff names are constructed, we don't actually know what the first measure of the system will be, so there was no straightforward way to make it happen. But that doesn't mean it's impossible, just more work than I was willing to undertake at the time. Could you file an official feature request for this? And - do you think it needs to be an option? Would be OK to just do it automatically?

[SUGGESTION] As you can see, there are quite a few collab works on musescore, why not make it possible so that multiple users can edit one score at the same time while able to communicate to each other and seeing what other people are doing? This would sort of be similar to Google Docs. The other features are great! As an oboist, we are often asked to play the English Horn/Cor Anglais/Corno Inglese and the transposition one is really helpful. :]

Best wishes,
~Eddie/KeldeoJustified~

In reply to by KeldeoJustified

This is indeed true for now (although note, key for Horn should be G, not F the piece is in C - an "F" instrument *adds* sharps. The code is actually in place to make this work automatically, but a bug elsewhere prevents it from working. Meanwhile, you can change the key signature manually for that staff by pressing Ctrl while adding it.

I teach technology at a music school, musescore among other software. If a Musescore congress is ever planned, I gladly offer my school facilities to host it (very nice installations, full equip). We are in the mediterranean coast of Spain. Just let me know.

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