Editing note length without "eating" next notes or adding rests ?

• May 15, 2021 - 23:14

Changing a notes' length in MS is not something easy.
Either it will "eat" next notes, or it will introduces rest that are difficult to get rid off.
I would prefer MS moving the notes around than that behaviour.

E.g. Screenshot 2021-05-16 000411.png

If I press "Add triplet" on the 3 first quarters, instead of having a triplet, a quarter and a rest (Expected situation), I've got that weird situation of those 3 triplets of eight notes (Add triplet situation). Until now, I've not been able to solve these kinds of situation otherwise that copy/paste and delete.

I'd be so easier if MS could just move the notes.

Is there a way to activate such a mechanism ?

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Screenshot 2021-05-16 000411.png 21.57 KB

Comments

If you select three notes and press [UpArrow] they all go up by a semitone. If you select three notes and press [Del] they get deleted. If you select three notes and press the shortcut for staccato, they all get staccato. Now, if you select three notes and press the shortcut for triplets they all get made into triplets.

The correct (i.e. currently accepted) method for making triplets is documented in the Handbook. If you want it to do what you are trying to do (turn those notes into a triplet and move the next, unselected, note back a slot) then you can put in a Feature Request (it may have already been requested, of course).

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Or switch to Dorico where they have recognized the need for a true insert mode which has been sadly denied here for years. Probably because the data structure in the implementation have been wrongly designed a long time ago (it is measure based instead of note based) which makes implementation of things such as full copy or measureless mode pretty much impossible. Well not impossible but certainly very difficult.
Switching to Dorico means paying lot of money but more importantly saving your work in a proprietary format, so that would be a bad idea though.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Well, When I'm in "Insert" mode I can only add notes, not changing note durations.
Selecting a note, going to Insert mode, and then pressing on the "dot"/"whole"/"'half"/... does not do anything. Should it ?
In my case, I've to leave the "Insert" mode to have the knobs doing anything. And then, it does what's on my screen capture.
(I couldn't upload a video capture).

In reply to by parkingb

I realize that your example is a simple one. But,FWIW, Sibelius insert mode (Change Duration) will change the dotted half to a whole and move the 16ths over a beat. But the number of steps involved is roughly similar to, in MuseScore, selecting the 16ths/hit "R"/select the dotted half/select whole note.
I doubt any platform will let you select a note and change the value and automatically move subsequent notes accordingly. The software has no idea what you want unless you tell it. In this case you wanted a whole note on beat one. It did exactly that. How was MuseScore supposed to know what you wanted to do with the 16th notes?

In reply to by frfancha

So, in Dorico, you select the dotted half, change it to a whole and the 16ths move over. What if I want the 16ths to go away? What happens if you change the dotted half to a quarter note? Do the 16ths move to the left?
What is the point of my intervention??
??
I have no doubt that Dorico, being newer, can do some things that other platforms can't. It depends on what you are trying to do.

In reply to by bobjp

Here is how it GuitarPro handles this (*):
GuitarPro.png
Its principle is to
* limit the impact of the modification to the current measure, leaving this measure either incomplete or my too many beats (none are outside of MuseScore's DNA).
* provide a function to reorganize the measures/beats correctly.

My first example is done in 2 steps in GuitarPro:
GuitarPro2.png
* Convert the 3 quarters to triplet: 1 keystroke
* Convert the last quarter to half : 1 keystroke

MuseScore can certainly get some inspiration here.

(*): which is (for me) by far more efficient at the level of the editing of score notes than MS.

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GuitarPro2.png 3.58 KB

In reply to by parkingb

Well, if your example wasn't involving tuplets, MuseScore single measure insert mode would work as easily as what you are showing.
Point is that changing notes from/to tuplets in MuseScore is pretty much impossible, and that should clearly be improved, but for the rest their single measure insert mode does exactly what you would expect.

In reply to by frfancha

Insert is working fine. Modifying is a possible but longer story.
dotted-half.png
* 5 steps in MuseScore ( 4/4->5/4, add a rest after the dotted-half, remove the dot, change the half to whole, delete the rest added when moving from 4/4 to 5/4)
* 3 steps in GuitarPro ( 4/4->5/4, remove the dot, change the half to whole)

There is room for improvement here in MS.

Whenever I'll find some time, I'll take the source code from Github and dive into it. Is there an official way to proceed with Change Requests ? Such as discussion boards ? I would go for a "Timewise edit"...

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dotted-half.png 14.89 KB

In reply to by parkingb

You want to create a 5/4 measure? Just create one. You also want to Ctake the four sixteenth currently on bet four and move them to beat five? So just do so, directly cut and paste, simple as that. You also want to change the duration of the first note from dotted half to whole note? So do that too. Move the moves you want to move, change the duration of notes you want change the duration of, you're in complete control of whether you do just one of those operations, both, or neither.

In reply to by parkingb

Sure there is room for yet more features. but the point is, cut and paste does work. Try it. It completely and totally handles the case shown here and millions of others. Your initial post shows you haven't yet learned how to use this to solve that problem, and so I showed you how you can indeed very simply solve that problem using the tools provided already.

After you learn how to use the tools that are already provided and work perfectly to solve problems like this, then one can begin to consider whether complicating the interface by adding yet more tools to accomplish the same thing but in a different way would be warranted.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Let's stop the talk. And even if in this single thread we are already 3 to say Musescore is not efficient in that domain, I understand why it is difficult for you to hear that.
So let's be constructive. What's the feature request mechanism here ? So that I can expose my proposition, have a chat, a vote about it, and (why not) implement it myself (I feel confident enough with MS data model) .

In reply to by parkingb

I am being constructive. You posted steps showing you had not figured out how to accomplish this task, so I volunteered my time to provide you with free information to help you. Step one in continuing a constructive conversation would be to acknowledge this and stop accusing me of not wanting to hear suggestions.

If you have design experience and ideas on how to design alternate features to accomplish that same task differently, feel free to make a proposal on the feature request forum. The more specific the better, as the general idea of this has been floating around for years, but no one has really ever taken the time to think through how it would work in practice.

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