MuseScore and Playing Canons (singing rounds)

What I mean is there is no universally-known symbol that could be added to the MuseScore palette with a universally-understood standard behavior for Musescore to implement. As opposed to, say, repeat signs, where both the appearance and behavior of the signs is universally known and understood. MuseScore has repeats signs on its palette, so everyone expects them to work a certain way, and they *do* that work that way.

Whereas while you could *invent* a symbol to use to specify a canon, no one else would understand what that symbol is for since it is not standard. And I don't think it is the place of MuseScore to be inventing new symbols and defining behavior for those symbols. And in any case, for any but the very simplest of cases, canons seem like things that the user would need to interact with to explain how he wants it done - how would you specify the case where the entrace is supposed to be at a different pitch? Or an inversion, and retorgrade? Making a facility like this truly useful would require a tool with its own user interface; it is not something you could do by just placing symbol on the score. That's why I see this being a kind of add-on. Really, as it is *strictly* a playback thing, it could even be done as a standalone MIDI player.

Not that there is no chance something like this could *ever* be added to MuseScore. eventually, when all the *standard* notations are fully supported - including playback - and the user interface and everything else is as good as a professional notation program needs to be, then attention might turn to experimental features like this. But there is also a danger of "bloat" - adding too many features to a program that most people don't need, making the program larger and slower than necessary, complicating the source code and making it harder to maintain, etc. Since what you describe is jusy *not* something that standard notation normally allows for, I'd be very wary of seeing it added to the program itself. That's why I keep suggesting an add-on - that way, only those few people who wish to use this non-standard feature would be affected.

As for the note-by-note playback, I know exactly what you mean, and yes, that would be great. Finale has a feature like this they call "scrubbing playback" (the term comes from recording studios), where press a special combination of keys then hover your mouse over a note, it plays the whole score at that note. You can play just that note, or move your mouse as slowly or as fast as you want, forward or backwards, and the playback follows your mouse. I know there is already a feature request to add this, so hopefully someday we will see it.

Meanwhile, what I often do is turn the tempo scaling factor way down in the play panel, then click the note I want to hear and hit space, then again to stop it before it goes on to the next note.