"Disable logic" setting

• Jan 23, 2022 - 03:41

Musescore is programmed in a way that tries to guarantee the user can't make any errors, such as using two notes on the same string at the same time.

This is similar to what most chess programs do when they don't allow the user to input an illegal move (such as a rook moving as if it were a bishop). Nevertheless, the leading chess software has a box the user can tick to disable rule enforcement. Although not used very often, this allows players to register mistakes they committed during a game without either player noticing. Without that feature, a game transcription could be impossible to continue from the place the mistake occurred and forward.

Back to music, the use case for such a feature in MuseScore would be allowing the user to circumvent the rules and fix it later in order to facilitate the editing process. This is happening to me right now: due to my lack of knowledge, I didn't know it was better to start notating the basses in voice 2 before continuing with the trebles. Now when both voices share the same note, MuseScore automatically assigns the new one to another string. This means I'm having to first select the shared notes on the treble part, swap them to voice 2 and then rewrite voice 1. This kind of process could be easier if I could stop rule enforcing just for a little while.


Comments

You can enter parts in any order what you want, so it isn't clear what you mean exactly. Best to attach your score and describe in more detail what the problem is, then we can understand and assist better.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

For the purposes of this particular score, I've already managed to find a way to do it. The feature request is about allowing MuseScore to produce invalid xml files/sheets if the user intends to do so. Some times it is faster to write by breaking the rules and then fixing what is wrong then having a valid sheet all along the process;

In reply to by Fábio Ruiz de …

Could be, but again it's really impossible to guess what you mean exactly without seeing the score. As it is, it simply isn't clear what rule you want to be able to break and what you'd like to see MuseScore do instead. MsueScore dopes allow a number of notation rules to be broken already, and chances are goog that whatever you were trying was already possible. It just isn't clear yet what you mean.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought that was clear from my first line. One example would be adding enharmonic notes in two voices for a string instrument. MuseScore's default behavior is assigning one of the two notes to another string, as each string can only produce one sound at a time. But say my intention by adding this second note was just to improve readability on the sheet part (see picture below) and the new didn't actually need to be displayed (on tab only, not on sheet) or played. Then I might have to deal with swapping the two notes on the tab so I can hide the proper one.

Here's what I managed to build by swapping voices for the measure, entering my new enharmonic and swaping back:

Captura de Tela (140).png

Here, I created voice 1 first and then voice 2 (which I now know should always be done the other way around, but I already had 38 measures). The triplets made it hard to use a simple cut/copy and paste, so I had to resource to the method I described above. It would have been a lot easier if MuseScore weren't pushing the new (or was it the old?) notes to another string.

Attachment Size
Captura de Tela (140).png 44.38 KB

In reply to by Fábio Ruiz de …

Sorry, that’s just a picture, we really need a score to understand fully. Ideally, the state it is in right before you feel the need to break some sort of rule, then explain which specific note in that you want to add or change in a way that breaks a rule, and what exactly would be accomplished. Then we can show how to accomplish it - either by indeed breaking the rule, or by doing something different.

As it is, I am thinking all you would have needed to do was select the note you entered erroneously into voice 1 and move it to voice 2 with the toolbar button - no rule breaking required.

As mentioned, you can enter voices in either order; there is no reason ine has to be done first. But it does help to enter into the correct voice. And if you mess that up, it’s simple to move it. So again, we need to understand more precisely what you started with when you reached the point of thinking that breaking a rule would help.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I think I may have made things worse, as the swapping was used to add fingering, not for adding voice 2, but this time I produced a sample score and I'll describe what I'm thinking about:

This score has 2 measures: the first one is what I had, the second is what I was trying to achieve. This was done in two steps: first, I added the new voice 2 notes by clicking the corresponding string on tablature an typing the correct fret number. This makes the previous note, as seen on measure 1, shift to the string above (this is the rule enforcement I'd like to disable). Since now I have extra notes on the tablature (I wanted them only on the sheet for improved readability), the next step is toggling visibility for the shifted notes.

What I'm proposing here is that before entering my voice 2 notes, I could somehow disable the enforcing, so I would have two notes in the tablature in the same point in the same manner two enharmonic notes can occupy the same position in the staff. The improvement of having this feature would be that I wouldn't had to toggle the visibility for the notes in measure 2, as they wouldn't have been shifted to an empty string. Please note that while toggling visibility isn't a hard task per se, the way they are disposed in my score means I had to click each one individually.

Attachment Size
test.mscx 38.85 KB

In reply to by Fábio Ruiz de …

I'm sorry, but I'm still not understanding how having two notes on the same string would help. Youd still need to make one invisible, unless you wanted to actually see them both, right? Unless you mean, you want two identical notes on the same string, and you furthermore want MuseScore to hide one automatically. Wouldn't it be simpler to just have MuseScore recognize that it isn't necessary to show two notes at all? That much certainly seems reasonable. Of course there are times when you want the same note played twice on two different strings, but that would be less common so there could be a special command for that.

In reply to by Fábio Ruiz de …

Indeed, that makes sense. And as mentioned, I think that should happen automatically by default, assuming someone could come up with a good set of rules to describe when it should happen and how to override it.

For the record, from your original post, it sounded to me like you wanted some special mode where you could enter two different notes - like F and A - onto the same string in the same voice, with presumably both notes appearing side by side (a 1 and a 5, on the E string, say). It appeared you were saying that somehow being able to do this would help you correct errors you made in which voice you entered first, that this would be something you did temporarily while moving notes around and then you'd fix it later. That was why I was so confused!

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I'm sorry for the confusion, I've been so invested in writing this score that I thought the screenshot and test.mscx made things perfectly clear!

I'm glad we're finally on the same page and although right now I'm only able to present this one use case, I'm sure this feature would also be helpful in dealing with scores generated via OMR, containing lots of mistakes MuseScore would just assume to be right. I had a score that, while MuseScore would accuse being invalid gave me a bit of a hard time because it assumed some weird measures, with rhythms such as 31/63, were right and it just created extra pauses to make things right. I don't have that score anymore, as I copy and pasted everything useful from it and deleted it, but surely handling these weird files would be another use case!

In reply to by Fábio Ruiz de …

No doubt there could be features to handle any specific use case, but there really wouldn't be any one "disable logic" feature that handled them all, or even more than just a few. For instance, a feature that allowed two notes on the same string for a tab staff wouldn't have much use in fixing an error from a PDF of a flute score. Fixing those errors more easily would require other features - there is no one one single "logic" feature that controls everything.

Actually, though, if you truly want a completely "illogical" note, just add it from the Symbols palette. Then it's free from any musical consideration whatsoever. Occasionally that's useful, but mostly not.

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