Measures
Can anyone explain to me please why throughout all the versions of this otherwise wonderful
software, there was no attempt to fix a problem which was discussed for years?! Namely, bar width that can be fixed to maximum and not just minimum or even fixed to a desired width! It would save so much time and stress when dealing with the automatically increasing of measure/bar width as soon as you add notes to your score. I really do not understand why this significant flaw in the program attracts next to no attention...
Thank you anyone for your opinion.
Comments
Probably because nobody agrees in this being a flaw.
MuseScore 1 had this and it didn't work well enough.
In reply to Probably because nobody… by Jojo-Schmitz
Thanks for replying. How then do you deal with ever-stretching bars as you put in notes? Every time I add notes to bars it stretches them across and out!
Regards
In reply to Thanks for replying. How… by Coobligan
I rejoice that the measure isn't so small that it can't hold all of the notes and I can actually read them. I don't see any problem with the measure growing wider.
In reply to Thanks for replying. How… by Coobligan
In 4/4 time signature a single measure can contain sixteen 16th notes (4 notes per beat). Those sixteen 16th notes will require more room than, say, one single whole note in a 4/4 measure. Therefore the measure stretches (or shrinks) as notes are added (or subtracted).
When you are finished entering notes, if necessary, you can add system (line) breaks, increase or decrease stretch, etc. to refine the formatting of the score.
In reply to Thanks for replying. How… by Coobligan
A measure should never be ever-stretching; in fact, by default MuseScore tries to keep measures as small as possible and then fit as many as it can onto a system given your score's current style settings.
How we deal with it? By only worrying about layout once all the content (notes/markings etc) are in place. Making your music look good is far easier once the music is actually there.
In reply to A measure should never be… by jeetee
Thank you Jeetee. I am still not following... you see, the bars stretch across the entire width of the page as soon as I add notes to it.
Eventually, the whole score has 1 bar/measure per 1 line of stave or close to that! Not only it is hard to navigate such a canvas when you're
working on it, but also increasing or decreasing of bars after the whole score is complete will stretch everything before and after it yet again.
The whole thing is constantly moving as you work on your score, it is unbelievably uncomfortable. Why would not this program give you an
option to only increase the bar width when YOU want it and not when it "thinks" you have to many notes in the current bar???
It sounds like you are having some sort of issue with entering notes, but it isn't clear what. Normally the measure widths should be exactly correct according to standard rules of notation - empty measures narrowed, but the more notes in the measure, the wider the measure. So everything should be working perfectly right out of the box. Sounds like you have some sort of special situation where things aren't working as you expect. In order to understand and assist better, we would need you to attach the score you are having trouble with and explain the problem to us in more detail.
If you are trying to create music with a fixed measure width - like for a lead sheet, or music for children - or otherwise want measures of a different width than what the standard rules of notation require, then indeed, you will need to deliberately force measures to be the width you want. But don't do this until you are done entering notes, then you won't have to worry about things changing as you add notes.
In reply to It sounds like you are… by Marc Sabatella
Thank you Marc. I am still not following... you see, the bars stretch across the entire width of the page as soon as I add notes to it.
Eventually, the whole score has 1 bar/measure per 1 line of stave or close to that! Not only it is hard to navigate such a canvas when you're
working on it, but also increasing or decreasing of bars after the whole score is complete will stretch everything before and after it yet again.
The whole thing is constantly moving as you work on your score, it is unbelievably uncomfortable. Why would not this program give you an
option to only increase the bar width when YOU want it and not when it "thinks" you have to many notes in the current bar???
In reply to It sounds like you are… by Marc Sabatella
Please see the attached example... the very first bar is stretched. As soon as I try to decrease the width of it, it will change the length of all the other bars while compacting them. It would be so much easier it all the other bars kept their length and just moved together. Nevertheless, I do not understand why should the bar be stretched in the first place. It should be kept within the user's decision whether or not one wants to increase it when it looks too congested instead of fixing the entire score afterwards... where am missing the clue? Thank you in advance!
In reply to Please see the attached… by Coobligan
Add a System break?
The appearance becomes similar to what I get by opening with 3.0.5.
In reply to Please see the attached… by Coobligan
Your first bar is stretched like crazy precisely because you started messing with the stretch. I can see in Measure Properties it's set to an very high 4.40 - that's not something MuseScore did, you must have done that yourself.
In general, you've been manually adjusting the stretch on each and every measure for no apparent reason. It should almost never be necessary to do that: MuseScore does an excellent job already of determining measure widths; if you just leave it alone, things should be fine.
So, do Ctrl+A to select all, then Format / Stretch / Reset Layout Stretch, and then reassess. It looks much better to me immediately. It's a bit tight overall, because the default settings are optimized more for longer pieces where the goal is saving space. If you know you're creating a shorter piece and you'll want things to have more space overall, don't force this by manually adjusting each measure - you'll end up making things uneven as is the case here, and it's way more work than necessary. Instead, simply change the global spacing setting for the score in Format / Style / Measure. This makes everything wider consistently.
Or go in and add line breaks where you want, and the measures widen automatically, and again, consistently. In your case, it seems you probably wanted the repeat in bar 7 to start a new line, so instead of trying to trick MuseScore into doing this by playing games with stretch, just add a line break after bar 6. You get the measures on the lines you want in one click, and the spacing is perfect right out of the box.
Bottom line, there should be no reason to touch the stretch of any individual measure in this piece, or indeed in most pieces.