New Verison Has Made all my Music Unusable

• May 19, 2020 - 03:15

I just tried opening some scores I made with your program a few years ago and everything looks like crap now. All the lyrics have been rearranged into some insane order that's completely screwed up. How do I make things go back to the way they were? I spent hours arranging the stuff originally and now it's all ruined.

Attachment Size
She Loves Everyone.mscz 4.54 KB

Comments

Your score was created in version 1.x and current version is 3.4.2, so one would expect some (or rather many) changes to the layout because of the new features introduces in the past 8 years.

You can still use version 1.3 and your score will look like you intended it to be many years ago. You can download a portable version (1.3 Rev 2) here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/portableapps/files/MuseScore%20Portabl…

I still have version 1.3 and 2.3.2 installed along the current 3.4.2, just in case ;-)

BTW, your lyrics aren't really lyrics but staff text, so it is expected that they don't display correctly.

Maybe if you exoprt from old version to XML, this will import better in Musescore 3? A suggestion I give: When a piece is finished and printed, before archiving it, always export in Music XML as well, you never know in the future what cna happen.

MuseScore has made the choice (quite reasonable) to not implement the layout engine from previous version in new version.
So neither V2 nor V3 can display a V1 score as it looks in V1
And V3 can't display a V2 score as it looks in V2
The other way around you can't even open a score created with a newer version.
All that makes sense actually, and the good thing is that MuseScore doesn't link your PC to one version only as lot of software do (forcing you to override/uninstall V8 because you install V9).
With MuseScore so you can perfectly keep V1 / V2 / V3 side by side on your computer.

As mentioned, the fact that you misused staff text for what are actually lyrics is what is causing the problem here. It made it take far longer to begin with, and it didn't survive the update well because the conversion process assumes staff text really is staff text and lyrics really are lyrics. So, something to keep in mind for next time.

However, that said, while I don't have 1.1 installed to compare, it's actually not that hard to see what is going on here. I suspect you were using the option to force line breaks every 4 bars. That has changed to not be so inflexible, but it does mean you will need to run Format / Add/Remove Systems Breaks to re-add line breaks. Also, because you are using staff text in a way counter to what it was designed for, you will need to disable autoplace for these, by right-clicking one, Select / All Similar Elements, and unchecking it in the Inspector. This likely gets you closer.

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