Feature request: automatically create new bars when advancing past the last bar in note entry
Short description
(note that I use the british term "bar" here – substitute "bar" for "measure" if preferred.)
- I start note entry with a small number of empty bars ahead
- I enter a melody using the keyboard
- In the last bar, on the last beat, MuseScore will not advance the cursor and will overwrite that last beat with every entered note
- When finished with the melody, I realize MuseScore has discarded a number of notes that I believed I had entered
Importance
Since I've started using MuseScore a long time ago, I have often run into this issue. When entering a melody, I am usually focussed on imagining that melody and getting the notes right. Therefore I often do not notice that I am going past the last bar.
MuseScore provides auditory feedback by playing back those notes to me. Unfortunately, in this case, the auditory feedback does not correspond to what MuseScore puts down in music. This may be misleading.
Suggestion
At minimum, MuseScore should offer an option like "Append new bars when entering music". I personally think, it should be on by default.
When this option is off, MuseScore should either provide some different kind of auditory feedback, e.g. no sound at all. Or alternatively, MuseScore should not accept note entry at all and thus produce no sound either.
Comments
You're definitely not the first to suggest this and I do support the request. I've seen similar ones but I can't find it in the issue tracker at the moment.
In reply to You're definitely not the… by mike320
+1
In reply to You're definitely not the… by mike320
mike320: I thought so, but I couldn't find it either. :)
By the way: I was wondering whether it makes sense to implement this as an option – ie would anybody not want MuseScore to create new bars automatically?
As I recall, there was a forum thread on this, with some discussion of what such an option might look like And yes, not everyone would want such a feature, I for one would find it incredibly annoying to have to constantly delete unwanted extra measures every time I edited the last measure of my score.
In reply to As I recall, there was a… by Marc Sabatella
That would create extra measures only when entering rhym to long for the last measure, or only when the cursor is virtually after the last note. Otherwise yes that would be more a nuisance than a benefit.
In reply to As I recall, there was a… by Marc Sabatella
?? I can't see how it could disturb editing the laste measure.
The fact that the n+1 measure exists doesn't prevent you at all to edit the measure n. And editing measure n will not create measure n+1
The discussions I recall seemed to involve cases where measures would appear the moment you entered a note on the last beat of the piece. the note input cursor, after all, needs to go somewhere in that case. If you can design a system that solves that problem, I'm OK with it.
In reply to The discussions I recall… by Marc Sabatella
That's right. It's not straightforward to implement this without annoying side-effects.
But I imagine it should be okay if there was a state in which the note entry cursor is actually past the end of the score. Then if you enter another note, a new bar gets appended.
I think the suggestion that the measure be added only if the next note in entered by faith (that is expecting the measure to appear) it wouldn't be so annoying for anyone. If you put a chord on the last beat of the last measure, no new measure appears, if you add a new note, the new measure appears. From a user's point of view it would then work exactly like a word processor and there would be no need to append measures then later probably have to delete the extras you added.
Another thought: when adding a second voice, similar issues arise (rests in the second voice are added to the bar where there was only one voice). MuseScore should behave consistently in both cases (that is: new bar at end of piece vs. new voice).
The latter is a bug, reported in #307990: Edits to voice 2 in one bar can add a rest in the next bar.