Stem direction is linked between score and part

• Jan 17, 2018 - 17:05
Reported version
2.1
Type
Functional
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
closed
Project

Stem direction is linked between score and part, i.e. it changes in score when changed in part and vice versa, and IMHO it should not, as that is a layout thing.


Comments

Really? That surprises me. Can you share real world examples of when this should differ? In my experience they would want to be linked far more often than not. I almost never change stem direction for "layout" reasons - it's almost always to implement the specific beam direction that is musically appropriate in those few cases that are ambiguous and where my own preferences or those of the editor I am working for differ from MuseScore's defaults. Every once in a while it might be to avoid collision, but that's the exception, not the rule.

Of course, right now having them linked by default means there is no way to break this, so I'd support changing this short term. Long term, though, I hope to see us implement a way to override the default linking behavior on a case-by-case basis. And then I'd want the default to be back to what it is now, as I think it the more common scenario.

Score with staff with 2 voices, created 2 parts of it, one with hidden (and silent) voice 2 (works pretty well, voice one stems automagically look right, as do rests), the other with hidden (and silent) voice: doesn't work for the rests (an issue for this to follow I guess, they can get manually positioned though) nor for stem directions, and changing the latter manually changes them in score too, which I regard a bad thing, as that is supposed to be a layout decision and as such not linked.

Ah, interesting. Not a use case that had occurred to me. Won't be an issue in 3.0 once we have ability to generate parts from voices directly, so hopefully it won't be a problem if the default is to link stem direction in 3.0, but as I said, I do agree it might make sense to change this for 2.x simply because there is no way not have them linked otherwise. I hesitate though, because it creates extra work for the other cases which is unfortunate enough, but also likely to lead to errors that aren't noticed until too late, which is doubly unfortunate.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

There are situations where I have edited my score, then went into parts and changed stem directions for the purpose of avoiding things like staff text or tempo marks. I went back into the score and found that the stems (these are usually all beamed) were flipped and now interfered with stems and beams from the staff below them. I don't know if it's doable in 2.2 or worth the effort for a minor release. From what I'm hearing 3.0 should fix most of the problems in these situations.