Lock/unlock and hide/show layers

• Jun 7, 2013 - 19:27

When working with layers, I struggle with manipulating the notes because the notes on all layers are on top of each other. Thus it's really hard to access the note you need to alter. In photoshop, gimp or illustrator you can lock all layers you don’t want to work on so it's easy to access the layer you want to change. Will there be a similar tool in Musescore 2.0 where we can lock/unlock layers? In these programs you can lock/unlock a layer, but also hide/show layers. It would be great to have this feature in Musescore as well. Just a suggestion.


Comments

Assuming that by "layers" you mean "voices", I agree this would be a nice feature. But I also wonder if you are using this feature in some unusual way if this comes up very often. The only time I normally encounter difficulty is with *rests* in one voice overlapping notes or rests in another. This is not that hard to work around - just grab whatever is eaisest, move it, then move the other thing, then possibly reset the first. But it will also become mostly a non-issue in 2.0, as rests will automatically positing themselves better in a multi-voice context.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Yes, I mean voices by layers. In my piano compositions I often write notes that needs to be hold down longer, therefore the notes are placed on top of each other. I experience the problem when I need to connect beams or separate notes basically. I have attached an example of Chopin so you can see what I mean. You can, like you say, make the first selectable rest invisible, but in the end it's not a very good solution if you need to change something later.

Attachment Size
chopin_preludes_op28_8.png 8.91 KB

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

This is a recurrent problem with unisons, which church music in paticular is littered with.

9 times out of 10 Musescore will firstly select the note you don't want to edit, and then simply refuse to select the other one.

You then have to move the selected note before before you can edit the one you want to. This means a) you have to remember that note's pitch, and b) remember to put it back when you have finished :)

What would be really useful would be the ability to hide the voices you weren't editing a la Finale.

I think we should open an official feaature request in the issue tracker for this.

Does the OP know how to do that?

In reply to by Liriel

Or use edit / preferences / shortcuts to define a keyboard shortcut for the most common beam operations - I find that even easier, especially since I can use directly while entering notes via keyboard shortcuts as well. So it isn't all that common I ever have to go back after the fact and edit beams.

Still, the examp,e posted is definitely one where a "show only current voice" would co e in handy for various reasons. I definitely support the request. But once you learn your way around the various different ways of doing things, I think you'll find it actually doesn't end up being an biig issue very often. It's mostly operation that require double clicking the note that require the extra steps of moving another jote out of the way first. That's basically manual position of noteheads or rests. Which is why I mentioned the need to raise & lower rests as the main situation where this actually come up a lot in practice.

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