Cannot change voice when moved from another staff
I am trying to clean up a somewhat messy MIDI import. Specifically I moved some notes from treble to bass staff (with Ctrl-Shift-Down). On the treble staff these notes were of voice 2. Voice 1 in bass had two rests of the same duration in the same positions. After the operation I am left with these two unnecessary rests in the bass staff. I am unable to change the voice of my moved notes to 1. The rests cannot be deleted.
When I select one of the moved notes the status bar of the application window would still say it's on staff 1. So does Ctrl-Shift-Down not really move notes to the other staff, but only displays them as such?
A side issue: I am well aware that MIDI lacks the information depth needed to be adequately transformed into music notation. However the situation here seems trivial to me. Why would the import choose treble staff for notes that would easily and more logically fit in the bass? Just curious what the technical issue is here.
Comments
Don't use cross staff notation than, but copy/cut and paste them
In reply to Don't use cross staff… by Jojo-Schmitz
I was afraid, this would be the answer. Copy pasting is very tedious. I cannot cut/paste more than one note at a time, at least not when the destination is interspersed with other notes. Besides, the velocity level is lost after the cut/paste.
In reply to I was afraid, this would be… by fesida2667
Use the selection filter
In reply to I was afraid, this would be… by fesida2667
loosing the velocity settings is a good thing, you'd not want them anyway, see How to restore correct playback of dynamics and hairpins in an imported MIDI file
In reply to loosding the velocity… by Jojo-Schmitz
Yes, I know. I would have done this eventually. The MIDI is a recording of improvised playing. I like to start the notation process with the recorded levels as a reference.
In reply to I was afraid, this would be… by fesida2667
Copy & paste is indeed tedious, but someone better than fixing all the problems that attempting to "fake" the proper notation using cross-staff notation would be - you'd have tons of missing or incorrectly calculated rests and far worse to deal with. Realistically, by far the best solutions are to either a) fixing the MIDi file to export the two staves separately, or b) enter the music by hand. Either is likely to be much much much more efficient than any method of attempt to fix a poorly formatted MIDI file within MuseScore - it just wasn't designed for that.
As for why MuseScore picked the defaults it did, there is a bit of AI going on in trying to sort out the most playable notation, taking into account the pitch of the notes, the span of the hand, the presence of other notes. But like most AI algorithms, it is sometimes spectacularly wrong.
In reply to Copy & paste is indeed… by Marc Sabatella
I am considering to write a plugin to assist me with the cut/paste. Do you know any plugin which I could derive from or use as a reference? The idea would be something like: Given a grand staff, move every note to the "closest" staff. For every note try to reduce the number of voices to a minimum if the rhythmic values allow it. I would ignore playability or hand span at first, deal with it later.
In reply to I am considering to write a… by fesida2667
If "closest" staff is pitchbased, then you can do the following:
In reply to If "closest" staff is… by jeetee
Nice trick! I found out that I can get even quicker results when I import the MIDI with "Split staff" disabled, clean up a bit, then do the split.