MuseScore 2 album/song joining
So, form what I understand, MS2 is no longer being maintained. Still, I can not switch to 3 at the moment, very busy schedule and plugin API changed too much for me to re-learn some functionality for now.
With that said, I want to know whether the join scores feature is considered completely broken in that version or am I missing something? It works fine for a few scores, but if it's too many, sometimes more than 10, sometimes not even, when I attempt to open the joined file MS says it's corrupted. If I choose to ignore the warning and open it anyway, I notice after some scores, something went really bad and some notes simply fall out of the correct tempo. Is this how it is for everyone? Can it be something really specific, like the use of Staff Text? Is there any issue on the tracker where I can read more about this? It's the single feature that made me choose MS some 6 months ago and this weekend I realized building a single songbook from 324 scores files, trying to figure out when it'll corrupt the file, and then having to do it almost on a page-by-page basis in order to avoid crashes, is simply too random, too error prone, a real pain. Please, someone give me a direction, I've had to do with printing a single score per page to a PDF but it's an awful solution for something which should be really simple... I can provide example files if this issue is a new one and there is interest in helping figure out what's causing it.
Comments
Songbook in version 2 has serious limitations and problems. That's the main reason it was delayed being put into version 3. Hopefully someone is quietly working on it, but I don't know.
In reply to Songbook in version 2 has… by mike320
I'm interested in knowing whether this is simply a limitation on the number of measures, since a joined scores are just a bunch of measures and vboxes concatenated, I suppose there's a limit to the number of measures MuseScore can handle? Because if there isn't, I can implement a simple song-joiner and avoid whatever limitation the MS joiner has...
In reply to I'm interested to know… by knuckvice1
There is no limit on the number of measures you can join, but each score needs practically the same instrument set up, with little variation permitted. There are probably other issues, so when I've used the album, I set up my instrument lists the same in all files, and hide those I don't need in a given file. The only issue with the number of measures might be slower response from more measures.
In reply to There is no limit on the… by mike320
Well, after some long overdue investigation, the corruption seems to come from having scores with different time signaturse: when the a score has no time sig (4/4 assumed) the application borks. The issue with this is that measure length becomes messed up if I simply add a 4/4 signature...
In reply to Well, after some long… by knuckvice1
I warned you there are other issues, and I don't know all of them. Try to add a time signature that matches to only the last measure so it won't be assumed to be 4/4. Perhaps this will make it work. After the merge, you can then try to remove the time signature. Also, make sure you allow section breaks at the end of each file.
In reply to I warned you there are other… by mike320
Ok, it SEEMS to be solved by doing the following (workaround):
1) explicitly tell the actual time signature for every measure
2) adding the actual time signature to the first measure of every score
3) add some negative trailing & leading space to the time signature so it doesn't take more space
4) hiding the time signature
Since my purposes for songbook are for PDF printing, this suits my need. Do note I have not tried to concatenate more than 1 song and I'm trying all this by manually editing mscx files on a text editor, not by doing it on MuseScore. I'm finishing writing an importer that does all the 4 points above and will tell if it borks on any score, but I'm guessing it should be fine.
In reply to Ok, it SEEMS to be solved by… by knuckvice1
For PDF try PDFSaM, it can merge multiple PDFs into one
In reply to For PDF try PDFSaM, it can… by Jojo-Schmitz
The issue with page merging is that i'm limited to one score per page, which is unfeasible when printing to paper. Could not find any PDF editor capable stitching pages together.
In reply to The issue with page merging… by knuckvice1
You can, however, use the Image Capture tool in MuseScore to take images of each score, and assemble them all in a word processor.