Truly invisible time signatures
The 'invisible' signature is convenient but it still takes space on the staff. I would prefer that it be completely absent from the rendering. I am scoring pages of short exercises, some of which consist 4/4 eight notes and others of which contain 12/8 triplets. No time signatures are really needed but the extra space IS needed.
Comments
Try turning off "Create time signatures" in "Style->Edit General Style->Page", then delete the existing measures in a piece and add new ones. You might even be able to make that a template, but I suspect you'd end up getting a new time signature anyhow. Maybe not, though.
Anyhow, not quite the same as just being able to simply delete the time signature, but a fine workaround.
In reply to Try turning off "Create time by Marc Sabatella
> Try turning off "Create time signatures"
Doesn't work for me. This is how I already had my system set up -- all signature and courtesy signature options turned off -- but the signature still appears when I select it. Unless there's some different way to change time signature besides dragging it from the palette? Perhaps I'm missing some concepts.
In reply to Doesn't work that way for me by spinality
Well, I wasn't imagining you actually changing time signatures; I was just thinking you wanted to hide the time signature at the start of the chart. I figured you'd just be entering triplets for the 12/8, or going into measure properties and changing the "actual" time signature. I suppose you probably don't know about the latter? Very useful for this sort of thing. It's a time signature change just for the duration of the measure that doesn't add anything visible to the score. Maybe that's all you really want?
In reply to Well, I wasn't imagining you by Marc Sabatella
Aha, well you're right, thanks. I hadn't noticed this feature. It is more or less what I want, except it proves to be too hard to use for my situation.
In my case I'm switching back and forth between blocks of 12/8 or 9/8 triplets and sections with 4/4 eighth notes. (Each exercise is on a separate line, so there's no ambiguity.) Measure properties can only be set for a single measure, not for a group of measures. Moreover when I delete my inserted time signatures, all the subsequent measures have any additional notes truncated, which makes editing more of a challenge.
I see that if I set up the entire score as 12/8, then I could adjust individual measures down to 4/4; but this would also be tedious. In my special case, I can see that it's better to live with invisible time signatures that take up blank space on the page. I really do want to switch back and forth between signatures, but want to suppress the signature. In a normal score of course one wouldn't usually do this, although in older works there are places where triplet sections are handled this way.
In reply to Aha by spinality
I am still not quite understanding what you mean about deleting inserting time signatures. If you use the method I am discussion, there are no time signatures to delete. Or do you mean, you've already entered the music using time signature, and now you are trying to change it to this other method? Yeah, that would be problematic. But it should OK for *new* scores. Just enter the correct actual durations before entering notes.
There's probably a 50/50 chance of this working, but for your existing scores, you could try creating a new, empty score, set the actual durations appropriately, and then copy and paste the music from the old score to the new. Except that my recollection is that tuplets caused a crash when copying and pasting between files. Not sure what 12/8 would do.
In reply to I am still not quite by Marc Sabatella
1. Changing an existing score has the obvious problems.
2. When entering a new score, I would need to use this method ON EACH MEASURE wherever I want something other than the default. That's fine when this is only needed to deal with exceptions. However if I'm doing it a lot, then this can involve a lot of extra manual steps.
The score I just finished entering consists of twelve pages of 6-9 staves per page, each of which consists of 2-6 measures. Any given two- to four-measure group might need to be in 4/4, 6/8, 9/8, 12/8. (Under 2.0, I would probably have a section break at the end of each group.) The easiest way to enter this today is to insert time signatures at the beginning of each group. However, since the effective time signature can be determined from the context, I'd rather not include it (because I'd rather use the real-estate for the notes).
Hope this is clear. It's not a huge issue and my case is a little specialized. Nevertheless I find I need to do this a good deal due to the nature of the scores I'm creating.
In reply to Yes, two different issues involved by spinality
Understood. I guess at least some the measures you'd want adjusted in this fashion are adjacent, then? Otherwise, then you'd have the same issue even if you did with "truly invisible time signatures".
I'd favor seeing the addition of a time-signatureless mode, and I know others have requested such a thing for "ancient" music as well as "modern" music. More important to me is a key-signatureless mode (looks just like key of C, but never affected by transposition), but it seems maybe there is a certain similarity between these concepts that could influence how it was designed / implemented.
BTW, you're doing a great job of finding areas for improvement - whether in the product itself, or in the documentation!
In reply to Understood. I guess at least by Marc Sabatella
Yes, many adjacent measures; that's why it seemed there should be an easier way. Agree about benefit of signatureless modes (time/key). Sort of a "12 tone one beat" mode.
Thanks for the feedback. I wasn't sure if I might be making too many suggestions, but as I said elsewhere, it seems better to let them out than keep them bottled up. Kind of like burps. :)
In reply to Adjacent measures by spinality
It helps that your suggestions don't come across as being over-critical - the constructive tone of all your posts makes it much easier to respond to the suggestions, rather than to have to defend MuseScore!
In reply to It helps that your by Jon Foote
I hope it's also clear that my suggestions are the result of using MuseScore to do serious work on real notation projects. So nobody has to defend MuseScore to me...it's the tool I've chosen to use for my own professional efforts. That being said, I do realize it's an evolving tool still on an early release. So it's not surprising that I find areas where specific things I happen to be doing take more time or effort than they could...especially since some of the things I'm doing are a little weird or unusual.