Laissez Vibrer: Chords tied to nothing

• Jan 18, 2012 - 12:36

Some days ago I posted this on the Issue Tracker, but I think it may me more useful here:

http://musescore.org/en/node/14437

Summarizing, it's a feature request for adding ties to notes that don't lead to other notes. It's very typical of Debussy and Ravel.

Comments

• Jan 20, 2012 - 14:53

Well, I find at least three drawbacks in this:

1)Using that palette and trying to do things like this cause crash 60% of the times in 1.1. and the most recent trunk.

2)Those symbols can't be anchored to notes, they are floating, so any repagination or bar rearrangement is going to mess it up.

3)They aren't ties/slurs: their size/length/curvature can't be changed and they don't look as normal ties at all.

So, in my view, that's a very low quality solution (I'm sorry!). There are at this moment much better alternatives, even though they are hard to implement (eg. tieing the notes to real notes and then hiding those notes).

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• Jan 20, 2012 - 16:38

Well, I was offering it as a workaround, not a solution. Like I said, I hadn't tried it in practice, and as you point out, there *are* drawbacks. But it is simpler to use than some of the other more robust solutions, so it might have value in some cases. It's nice to have that choice, but it will be nicer still if/when a "real" solution is implemented.

However - I've never once seen a crash while using the F2 text symbol palette, nor can I remember anyone ever reporting such a crash. Can you be more specific about the problems you have seen? In a separate thread, ideally.

Also, the text symbols *are* attached to notes. Perhaps not as intelligently as musical symbols are. But they *do* follow the notes around the page as you change formatting, to within a millimeter or so. Only very slight manual adjustments should ever be needed. They won't reposition vertically if you change the pitch, however.

I find that if I enter this symbol then increase the font size to 18, it is a pretty convincing imitation of a true tie, if still very much on the short side. Probably works a bit better going into voltas than as an LV indication. But it works well enough for that I think it is probably preferably to using a slur for this purpose. The sort of adjustments I have to make to force a slur going *out* of a note look like a tie going *in* are more fragile than the text placement - any reformatting of the score *will* mess up the positioning.

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• Jun 17, 2013 - 18:53

Hi, this answer comes a bit late but I used a method where I change the actual beats in the bar (right click on the bar and change the number of of beats, do not change the time signature), and add an extra note to tie the first note to, then right click on the new note and make it invisible.

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• Jun 21, 2013 - 15:32

Doesn't that cause a wrong midi playback?
I just entered a manual beam and edited it. What is not really great is that when I have to do this for a number of beams I cannot copy/paste them. Apparently when I select a beam I can access cut/copy/paste from the menu but this does nothing. In another thread I saw that only things in a blue box can be copied and pasted, which seems weird and limiting to me. But when the software is not setup right for this it might be difficult to change.

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• Jun 22, 2013 - 02:07

It isn't quite true that only things in a box can be copied or pasted - I was talking specifically about plugins. The manner in which plugins access the current selection seems to require the selection to be contiguous, so it wouldn't make sense to allow multi-selections that are not. Copy and paste actually does work on individual items, much of the time anyhow.

Not sure what a beam has to do th the l.v. notation though - are you sure you're talking about the same thing?

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• Jun 22, 2013 - 12:39

Hi Marc,
I should have said slur instead of beam. Sorry for the confusion.

I started out with the notation software Notator, which is now Logic and of course much more focussed on recording and mixing than notation now. So I switched, first to Lilypond and now to MuseScore.

Coming from Logic, I am used to selecting e.g. a slur and copy/pasting it. In MuseScore I added a slur and it ended up on the beam side, not the note side. So I manually edited it to my liking, but since this occured a number of times I wanted to copy/paste and found out I couldn't. This would mean I have to edit each slur manually and it is hard to get them all to look alike. I fixed it by copying part of the bar and that also copied the slur.

Copy/pasting only a subset by selecting indivdual notes is also not possible in MuseScore. This comes in handy when bars are not the same but only slightly different. I can do it by copy/pasting a bar and then changing it, which is a little bit more work.

I hope I do not sound like the guy who complained that MuseScore is worthless. I think it is a great program. Logic also has its quirks and I would recommend Lilypond only to those who have an affinity with programming. My guitar-buddy has used Finale and has converted instantly to MuseScore when I showed it to him. But I'm learning to use it and find the way selection works still counter-intuitive. I'm a programmer myself, so maybe I can help fix some things. But first I want to get to know the program better because you have to understand the underlying design.

Kind regards,
Ruud

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• Jun 22, 2013 - 15:44

Well, one bit of good news - flipping the direction of a slur doesn't require manual editing at all. Just click the slur and hit X - and this works for as many slurs at once as you care to multi-select. Also works for stem direction and several other markings. So really, there is no need to manually edit and then copy slurs. At least, not just to flip them. Manually editing slurs is more of a rare special case thing, and it would be even more rare that any place you wanted to copy that slur to would require the same manual edits. So I think you are perceiving this limitation in copy/paste to be more of an issue than it actually is in practice once you learn how things work - like flipping slurs.

As for other improvements to copy & paste, I guess the idea of being able to copy & paste a discontiguous multi-selection of notes still strikes me as sort of an oddball corner case thing to want to do. I mean, if you have a measure of 8 notes and you want all but one two notes copies, it seems like more work to actually get the selection right (selecting the six you want, or selecting the measure then deselecting the two you don't want) before copying, than it is to simply select the whole measure. copy, and change the two notes you want changed. Especially since if you copy all but two notes, you then have to then enter a replacement for the notes you didn't copy, and entering a new note takes exactly the same amount of work as changing a note. Maybe there is a use case I'm still not seeing, but I'm thinking it really has more to do with you being *accustomed* to that workflow than it actually being *easier*.

Now, those comments address notes and manually edited slurs, but that is not to say there aren't cases where there are things you want to copy and paste that are hard to accomplish now. I think, though, that "most" of us would be much more interested not in discontiguous multi-selections, but rather, a "filter" that could be applied to a region. So, select a region but specify that you want to copy notes but not articulations, or articulations but not notes, or control whether text gets copied along with the notes, or copy voice 2 but not voice 1, etc. This is possible in Finale and it's a very common request for MuseScore.

I can instantly see how this would help in a wide variety of situations - including but not limited to most if not all of the use cases you are currently thinking of resorting to discontiguous multi-selections to accomplish. I say "resorting to" discontiguous multi-selections, because in many of the use cases I see, actually making the discontiguous multi-select is likely to be quite a lot more work than the select-region-and-filter method. The common situation of wanting to copy just one voice from a passage that is several measures long is one example - trying to individually ctrl-click the notes of onte voice but not the other over the course of several measure is a lot of work. And for sufficiently small selections (like say just three items) it just isn't that much work to do the copy & paste one item at a time, which does work for many element types.

So speaking for me personally, if you're keen to get under the hood and work on any of this, I'd much rather see the effort going toward allowing a filter on the selection than on support for copy&paste of discontiguous multi-selections.

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• Jun 22, 2013 - 17:10

Thanks for the reply. I should of course have read the manual. Sorry for that. I deleted the manual slurs and replaced them with the regular ones and that works great. Note entry with the keyboard is indeed very easy even with the Sor piece that I am working on now to bring the number of pages down to fit on the stand. It is polyphonic and has quintoles and whatnot and that works great.

As to the selection thing you are probably right that it takes getting used to. Still it seems inconsistent to me that it does not react the same. Also selecting with shift-click does not always do what I expect. I wanted to copy a number of bars and clicked on the first note of a bar and then shift-clicked on the last note of a bar further on. But it also selected about half of the next bar. As I said, I'm trying to figure out the idea behind the program but I guess I'm not the only one who is confused about this. That said I have been able to do everything I needed quite easily with the help of this forum and the manual.

Thanks for your help.

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• Jun 23, 2013 - 18:11

Verified with respect to 1.3. I've never seen this except in cases where the score has become corrupt, but I don't see any of the other usual signs of score corruption here. In particular, everything still appears to have the proper number of beats, and deleting measure 39 doesn't adversely affect measure 40. I think the issue has to do with the "holes" you've created in these measures - places where you apparently deleted rests in higher numbered voices. There has been some debate over whether that should be allowed at all - the preferred way to do what you are doing here is to simply *hide* the rests. But I don't know that this is really the reason - it's just the only "suspicious" thing I see going on. Maybe someone else will spot something.

I did try this on a recent 2.0 build, and the exact same thing occurs. So it's probably worth submitting as an actual bug report in the issue tracker.

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• Jun 23, 2013 - 18:55

I created http://musescore.org/en/node/21638 in the issue tracker.
I was aware that the fileformat is zipped xml, but I was not aware that deleting a rest causes a 'hole'. If it is, why not prohibit deleting them (I can't delete them in the first voice anyway) and only give the option to hide as you suggest? Is there a disadvantage to prohibit deleting?
Anyway, to play it safe I wil hide them from now on, but new users are likely to have the same problems.

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• Jun 23, 2013 - 19:09

Yes, and when I said that there has been some debate on this, the idea of simply forbidding deletion of rests has been proposed. As has simply making it less dangerous to delete rests - right now in 1.3, it leads to a number of undesirable side effects. Not sure what the current thinking is on this long term, but FWIW, current/recent 2.0 builds still allow rests to be deleted

But it's quite likely I'm wrong about this being related to your selection issue, since as mentioned, doing the voice swap trick (which works to recover deleted rests) doesn't fix your problem.

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• Aug 8, 2022 - 09:58

It seems like this issue has laid dormant for sometime, and perhaps it will be addressed in MuseScore 4, but here's a suggestion: Add noteheads that include either a short tie going from or to the note in question. (This is, I believe, Finale's solution to the issue.)

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