Since 3.6 New Score Doesn't Disable Vertical Justification of Staves from Default Style

• Aug 31, 2021 - 17:23

Ever since MuseScore Upgrade 3.6, all my new scores have "vertical justification of staves" enabled, which I don't want. I have tried to correct this by:
-- From a score in which I have manually diabled vertical justification, use Format / Save Style to update my default style file.
-- Verifying that Preferences/Score (copy attached) designates the correct default style.
But no matter what I do, the new-score logic doesn't seem to pick up the setting I want.

It's only a minor inconvenience, but I'd like to know what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks for any advice anyone can offer.

Attachment Size
MuseScorePreferences_Score.jpg 67.58 KB

Comments

• Sep 1, 2021 - 03:41

Can you post the MSS file?

Also, a score demonstrating why you are disabling vertical justification. That can have a purpose for a very special class of scores but for majority it's quite counterproductive. Sometimes disabling this has been suggested as a workaround for a bug that affects some but not all scores, but there are usually better solutions. Again, if you post a score where you are feeling the need to disable it, we can understand and assist better.

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• Sep 1, 2021 - 14:21

I use MuseScore mostly to create fake-book type lead sheets for singing, with melody, chord and lyrics. They generally take no more than two pages, often with "verse" on first page and "chorus" on second. For a signficant percentage of the scores, with vertical justification the staffs are so far apart it not only looks eccentric, it's a little bit harder to read.

Attached are examples of Fats Waller's "I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling" with and without vertical justification.

Maybe I'm just an eccentric old lady, but I just prefer NOT to have vertical justification. Prior to the big 3.6 upgrade, I wasn't even aware that it was an option. I don't understand why it isn't considered a bug that the new-score logic doesn't pick up this setting from my style file when it initializes the score. It's not a huge inconvenience to keep manually changing each score, and I understand that fixing such a bug might be very low on the priority list. But I hope that it would be scheduled for attention the next time there's a revision to the new-score-initialization logic.

Thanks for your attention.

Attachment Size
IveGotAFeelingImFallingCMajor.mscz 14.75 KB
IveGotAFeelingImFallingCMajor_WithVerticalJustification.mscz 15.3 KB

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• Sep 1, 2021 - 15:23

That looks good. May I assume that all that was necessary was to use [Shift]-[ to reduce the size of some measures? I agree that in general, a 1-page score is preferable, and I sometimes use that technique if I'm pretty sure I can make it fit. I hadn't tried it on this particular score but will modify accordingly. (Sometimes fiddling with [Shift]-[ can be very time consuming and in the end, I realize it just won't fit.)

And there are times when I specifically want the verse and chorus on separate pages, usually when the verse is optional. In attached examples of Ray Henderson's "Bye, Bye Blackbird", there are two sets of lyrics for the verse, but in some case only one verse would be performed. (Even if I wanted to cram this score on one page, I don't think I could make it fit -- or to do so, the typeface would have to be so small that nobody -- well, me anyway -- could read it [g].)

Thanks for your advice.

Attachment Size
ByeByeBlackbirdDminorVerseFMajorChorus.mscz 22.1 KB
ByeByeBlackbirdDminorVerseFMajorChorus_WithVerticalJustification.mscz 23.26 KB

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• Sep 1, 2021 - 16:47

Sorry, but I just prefer my scores without vertical justification. I do not understand why it's such a big deal. If the option to have vertical justification wasn't even supported prior to 3.6, it seems very strange that new-score-initialization wouldn't allow a user to set a style to default to the pre-3.6 norm. But if that's the way it is, I'll learn to live it.

Didn't mean to waste your time dealing with my eccentric preferences. [g] But thanks a lot .

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• Sep 1, 2021 - 16:50

It isn't a big deal. Just switch it off if you don#t want it, that's why it is an option.

Your method with loading an mss at score creation time should work though.
So we'd still need to see your mss file to try reproducing the issue

Starting the score from a template with that option switched off should work too

Maybe try the attached mss file, it only unsets that option, leaves averything else at the default, lean and mean:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<museScore version="3.02">
  <Style>
    <enableVerticalSpread>0</enableVerticalSpread>
    </Style>
  </museScore>
Attachment Size
no-enableVerticalSpread.mss 155 bytes

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• Sep 1, 2021 - 17:03

First - the setting should be picked up if present in your MSS file. That's why I asked you to attach it, so we could investigate. I do seem to recall this having been reported before but I thought it had been fixed.

Second - your reason for wanting this disabled for lead sheets specifically is sound. But the way to do that isn't by disabling it completely via style defaults - it's by using a template so you can disable it for lead sheets without adversely affecting other scores. Simply set up a lead sheet with the settings you like, and save it to your templates folder. Now it's available to select any time you create a new score. The template mechanism is considerably more powerful than the style file, since it can also include things like staff and sound settings and size of title frame. But more importantly here, you won't be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The vertical justification serves a crucial function in scores other than lead sheets, so disabling it produces worse-looking scores across the board when creating anything else.

Third - even for lead sheets, vertical justification shouldn't be spreading the systems across the page as much as it does. It's supposed to only be about spreading staves within a system (eg, for piano music, or quartet music, or big band, etc). The fact that it has such an effect on single-stave scores is another bug, one I very fervently wish we'd do a 3.6.3 release to fix, but that seems not to be in the cards. So, for lead sheets and other one-staff scores only, disabling it can make sense, to work around that bug. Hence, again, the template solution.

Finally, I would say that leaving so much blank space at the bottom of pages doesn't really look good either. Most professional editors (including myself when I have done this type of work) would strive to fit onto one page if possible, and if not, to work things out to have more balanced pages. And then fill the pages from there. That could mean any combination of larger staff sizes, fewer measures per system, and page breaks to balance the systems. In your Blackbird example, for instance, I can see why you'd want the chorus to start a second page even though that currently makes things a bit "off" in terms of balance. But it's still not hard to improve on this pretty dramatically. For instance, try setting that first page to be four bars per line - pretty typical for lead sheets - and that first page is filled much more nicely. The second page won't fit so well with four bars per line throughout, but four bars everywhere except the system with the voltas (out all six on that system) works beautifully. See the attached - this is how we'd have formatted that chart for inclusion in the "Real Book", more or less.

Attachment Size
ByeByeBlackbirdDminorVerseFMajorChorus - fill.mscz 25.69 KB

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• Sep 1, 2021 - 17:48

I'm sorry that I misunderstood and didn't attach the Style .mss file in the first place. Here it is.

Thanks for the advice on page-layout. I began using MuseScore heavily at the start of the pandemic, and so far have used it mostly as a practice aid for learning really difficult harmonies and rhythms. (The play-panel ability to vary tempos, turn chords on/of, loop specific portions of a song, is just terrific.) So far, I haven't paid too much attention to formatting. since I'm the main consumer of the lead sheets I've been creating, and my main criteria is verifying that I've accurately entered pitches, rhythms and chords and that whatever I produce is clearly legible. (I don't use the "Jazz" style because, all things being equal, it seems to require more space for the same amount of music, and to my myopic and astigmatic eyes, isn't any easier to read.)

The Real Vocal Books don't seem to require/prefer vertical justification (see Real Vocal Book Vol.1 P.200-201 Rodgers & Hart "Lover"). And other fake books from the Hal Leonard empire (e.g. Broadway Fake Book, Ultimate Fake Book, Best Fake Book Ever) seem to try to cram as much music as possible even if it means have parts of two songs on one page. So maybe it's just a matter of personal taste.

I'm leery of trying trying to fiddle the appearance too much because I find that sometimes I mistakenly hit one of MuseScore's many shortcuts and find that I've inadvertently modified some portion of the score that I didn't intend. (That's NOT a complaint, just an acknowledgement that I can be a fairly fumble-fingered typist.

Hope this sample .mss helps solve the mystery. And again my apology for not sending it in the first place.

Thanks again for all the help everybody offers.

Attachment Size
Swing.mss 60.74 KB

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• Sep 1, 2021 - 19:04

Thanks for the MSS file - I can confirm the bug. Seems to work when loading ther MSS file into an existing score, but that setting is ignored when using this as a default style.

It's important to keep in mind that what you are describing is not vertical justification. As I tried to explain, vertical justification is only supposed to affect what happens between staves within a single system - ensemble music, to avoid ragged bottom matgins in music with only system per page but where the systems vary in height. Trust me, you want this - there is never a time when you want a ragged bottom margin in such scores.

So, vertical justification has nothing to do with what you are seeing here. What you are seeing here is simply a bug, where enabling justification for lead sheets should have no effect whatsoever because there is only the single staff, but the bug causes it to also spread the systems out more than desired. So it
s not vertical justification itself you aren't liking, it's the bug that causes vertical justification to do bad things to lead sheets.

So again, the solution is to create your own template, not to use an MSS file. No one ever said you needed to use the jazz lead sheet template - I advised you to simly create your own template, by saving a score that is setup as you like to your Templates folder. Then simply select that from the template list, not the jazz lead sheet template, when creating new score. As mentioned, it works better than changing the default style, plus it's easier, and best of all, it actually works - the bug where this particular settings seems to be ignored is not present. Win/win/win.

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• Sep 1, 2021 - 19:33

Thanks so much for [a] the clear explanation of what vertical justification is and [b] that what the bug is that's causing my problem. However, I think there's still something mucking up the process even with I select my own template. What I did was:

[a] Save an existing score with justification-disabled to my templates folder. Subsequentely edited that templates to file to blank out all Score_Properties fields except platform="Microsoft Windows". Resulting file is attached.
[b] Select that as my template in the new-score initiation process.

Despite that, when I finished my new score, the Style "Page" settings still show vertical justification enabled. Resulting score attached. If there's anything else I can upload to help pinpoint exactly what is going wrong, please let me know.

Attachment Size
SwingLeadSheet.mscz 31.52 KB
_TestNewScoreFromTemplate.mscz 7.32 KB

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• Sep 1, 2021 - 19:21

BTW, it's true that in the case of "Lover", it was apparently decided to not balance and spread the systems. It's been a while, but as I recall, there was a threshold we tried to honor for the most and fewest number of systems we'd accept per page. I think 6 was considered too few unless there were multiple verses or other considerations, but 12 too many unless there was only a single verse. So charts of 12-13 systems could come out on two pages but unbalanced like this, and we elected to live with it. Even so, notice the empty space is only on the second page, not the first.

Anyhow, I didn't edit that chart, but I edited hundreds of others from this series. And for most, we did balance and spread. See for example Get Me To The Church On Time (page 102), or Desafinado (page 68), or Baby It's Cold Outside (page 30), or Unchain My Heart (page 310), or Well You Needn't (page 318), or The Song Is You (page 24), or Call Me (page 48), and so on. Really only a handful of charts did not get balanced in this way. And as far as I can see, they all have the extra space on the second page only, with the first page filled normally. So there is still a form of balancing that takes place to prevent the sorts of things shown in your charts.

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• Sep 1, 2021 - 19:57

Apologies if this is totally off topic. If you're busy, just please "burn before reading" [g]. But if you've been involved in editing fake books published by Hal Leonard, do you know if there's any way a user can report problems and/or ask questions that might be read/responded to by real live human beans? Examples of anomalies I'd like to report:

CONFLICTING ERRORS SAME SONG DIFFERENT BOOKS: Example for "Without A Song"
-- Best Fake Book P.757: C in bar 22 "as long as a song" should be a D
-- Real Vocal Book Vol.1-High Voice P.332: A crucial fermata in bar 24 missing. Also, all the 3-note pickups are designated as 1/4 notes rather than the 1/8th notes Youmans wrote (as in original sheet music on line from the Sheldon Harris music collection at Ole Miss).

COMPOSER/LYRICIST CREDITS: Throughout the Hal Leonard fake books there doesn't seem to be any consistency in how composer(s) and lyricist(s) are presented. Mostly the RVBs seem to follow traditional "words then music" sequence, but there are occasional oddities, such as RVB4 for "Who Cares" on P.428, which seems to indicate that George Gershwin wrote the words, and Ira the music [g].

Also, with all authors shown in one lump on the right side, it's impossible to distinguish between songs where all the authors collaborated on all aspects and those where some did words and others did music (if anybody knows). Examples from RVB4:
P.94 "Crazy Rhythm" by "Irving Caesar / Joseph Meyer / Roger Wolfe Kahn"
P.176 "Is It True What They Say about Dixie" by "Irving Caesar / Sammy Lerner / Gerald Marks"
According to Wikipedia, "...Dixie" was joint effort by all three, but "Rhythm" had lyrics by Caesar and music by Meyer & Kahn.

I realize that I may be the only person on the planet that cares about these nit-picky details, but it would make me feel better if I could report them somewhere.

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