Faster (batch) lyric entry
I'm an amateur choral composer, and one of my ongoing composing projects has been music in Old English. Unfortunately, (1) OE is hard to type, with a number of special characters, and characters with diacritics, and (2) often requires IPA symbols to accompany it for easy performance. This makes the musescore system of typing lyrics one note at a time (and even tab entry) very cumbersome. This compounds for music where I have to enter the same text for every line.
The only software I know of that has notation entry that's quick enough for me is Noteworthy Composer, which is incredibly limited in most other areas, including formatting. But it is small and has fast response times. And most critically for my use case, you open a Lyrics dialogue box and entire the entire text of a line, and it auto-populates across the notes, with context-dependence for slurred notes.
Do you know of any process in Musescore that would allow me to enter text like I find in Noteworthy?
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Comments
https://musescore.org/en/node/21522 ?
In reply to https://musescore.org/en… by Shoichi
Hi, thank you for this. It is an okay compromise, but actually not the thing I'm looking for. There are a couple reasons:
In the example I posted above, the text in the "Lyrics" box always reflects the text on the page, exactly. A change in that box automatically propagates to the appropriate note (with no text on a second slurred note)
1) It still requires me to individually put the lyrics in place on every single line through every single note. It's okay for a short piece like the one in the example. But for something like a mass, which contains hundreds of syllables, even if you don't repeat anything, this requires you to individually address that many notes times 4 (for SATB). I've found it's considerably easier sometimes to just paste, and adjust the lyrics as a batch for each line.
2) It doesn't look like this preserves the position of the syllables in the text editor. If I wanted to change something, I'd have to adjust it at the individual note level (this is helpful in some cases, but not great in others). For example, in the past I've discovered that I was making a spelling error throughout the piece. In Noteworthy, I can just alter the text in one place and the lyrics automatically adjust.
Any thoughts on this?
Such a Lyrics editor has been on the request list for MuseScore as well; so it's a safe bet that it will happen someday
But as for SATB with (near)-identical lyrics, you most definitely don't have to type them all in for every instrument. You can click the first syllable, Shift+click the last one, then copy; click on the first note for the next instrument and press Paste.
In reply to Such a Lyrics editor has… by jeetee
It is one of the projects proposed for this year's GSoC, see https://musescore.org/en/handbook/developers-handbook/google-summer-cod…
In reply to It is one of the projects… by Jojo-Schmitz
The trick is going to be giving it an option to turn it off and on. In noteworthy, one major pain is when you like how everything is set up, but you want to add notes in the middle, and have to keep going back to the lyric editor. If musescore can switch between "the notes define the lyric placement" (as I asked for) and "the lyrics are tied to specific notes" (how it currently is), musescore will be, hands down, the best software for entering lyrics.
In reply to The trick is going to be… by Casey Glick
Before I switched to MuseScore, I used a program called "Harmony Assistant". It's from a company somewhere in Europe and continues to have some really neat features, like a "Virtual Singer" which is a text-reading computer that can hold a pitch. (If you're a college student who doesn't know if any of his works will ever be performed, this is a WONDERFUL tool.) It also has batch lyrics entry, including the ability to just copy-paste the same phrase over and over ("Kyrie eleison Ctrl-V Ctrl-V Ctrl-V Ctrl-V, hey I finished the bass lyrics") and batch lyrics EDIT using a slightly stylized interface where measure breaks are represented with slashes. Heck, it lets you change fonts, which I employed so that my singers would know they had the melody because their font suddenly had serifs! I don't know how much of this is patented, but if the MuseScore dev team are looking for inspiration, all I'm saying is that I know where they can find it. =)