In need of advice for using Musescore more efficiently

.. you will probably minimize the mistakes.
Also you have complete control into, which goes where.

If you have the impression, Sibelius does a better job: you have the possibility to input the music into Sibelius, save as midi and import into musescore.

First of all, congratulations and best wishes for your project!

Unless in the pieces you are going to copy all the parts ALWAYS move together, you are going to need voices anyway to accommodate the occasional (or maybe not so occasional) spare note in a single voice or note stems up/down to differentiate the parts (sorry for my poor terminology, English is not my first language).

I would suggest you even use a separate stave for each part for easier proof-reading and for separate part generation. If and when needed, 4 SATB staves can be combined in 2 S/A - T/B staves with a rather simple procedure for a whole piece (or even several pieces in a single file) in single 'shot'.

If you decide to use Sibelius for input, I would suggest to export to MusicXML for importing into MuseScore, rather than MIDI, as MIDI looses rather important elements like key signatures and all the textual markings. In case, you may try with just one piece and check what gets carried across from Sibelius to MuseScore and what not.

But I really think the best approach is to create the 'master' version in 4 separate staves; it might be marginally slower (perhaps...) but would make things much more flexible for any future manipulation (and a corpus like the one you plan to create is likely to end up used in several different ways).

M.

I would probably do this by entering the soprano part in voice 1, then moving it to voice 2, then copying it to a temp staff and pasting it back onto itself so it came out in voice 1 again, then selecting everything on voice 2 and moving it down a third. That would give you a starting point to then correct the alto part from. The copy the whole thing to the bass clef and fix the tenor and bass parts. Or just copy the soprano part to the separate staff for alto, edit that, then combine them.

Some additional considerations:

1) Note entry usually takes only a fraction of the total working time; my experience is that I spend most of the time in a) proof-reading and b) laying out and formatting score pages. So, speeding up note entry might not be a wise path if this is at the expenses of the other steps (for instance because the resulting score is more cluttered and slower to proof-read).

2) When one hand is occupied in the PC keyboard to select note values, I don't think the other hand alone could enter the whole 4-part chords on the MIDI keyboard; conversely, moving one hand back and forth between the two keyboards is going to be slow anyway.

3) Sooner or later, voices are needed; in the sample score (326.mscz) they are necessarily needed in measure 7 and 9; I would evaluate if it is not worth using voices (or even separate staves, as I outlined above) through-out, as the result is cleaner, easier to proof-read and to maintain. Conversion of 4 single note staves into a 2-staves S/A-T/B layout can reliably be done when needed with a rather simple procedure (or via a plug-in).

4) Splitting chords into voices can possibly be done via a plug-in (I do not expect such a feature will be added to the programme as a built-in function any soon; in any case, not to version 1.0), but the occasional voice splitting already present in the score (see 3) above) might make things more complex; also, I am not sure I would trust such a plug-in unconditionally (i.e. more proof-reading after running the plug-in!).

5) I would consider how the whole corpus is going to be organized: one score (file) per piece or several pieces in a file? The first solution is possibly neater, but would require more time to set up many more files (even with the use of templates) and would make file management more complex. Also, if something changes in the layout / format / setup after a while, one needs to go back to change many more files one by one. Given the pieces tend to be short, possibly 10 or 20 pieces can be grouped in single score (=> 30 to 15 files instead of 300).

Lastly, an observation on the sample score you provided: why did you use voice 3 for T and voice 4 for B? Using voice 1 (the default) for T -- and then voice 2 for B -- would have been quicker.

M.