Allow "Exclude from measure count" command for multiple measures at once

• Jan 21, 2019 - 21:51
Reported version
3.0
Priority
P2 - Medium
Type
Functional
Frequency
Once
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project

In any score, select any measure, secondary-click > Measure Properties..., check "Exclude from measure count." Result: the measure is not excluded (as can be confirmed by looking at following measure numbers), and at least some of the time (not sure yet under what conditions) there will immediately be a crash.


Comments

Severity S2 - Critical S3 - Major

As far as I can tell from the video, it worked perfectly - I counted measures starting at 39, and the first measure of the next system should have been 47, but was 46 because you've excluded one. Am I missing something? Instead of a video, an actual score and precise step by step instructions to reproduce the problem are better.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Regression Yes No
Severity S3 - Major S2 - Critical

Interesting: I can't reproduce it in the new score I'm working on now; what I am discovering, however, is that one can't exclude multiple measures from the count with one Measure Properties use (i.e., it appears that one can only exclude measures one at a time): is that a "feature"? If so, it's a very annoying one: I'd like to suggest it be changed.

In the meantime, I'll revisit the score I was having the problem in and see if I can reproduce it, and if I can, I'll attach the score; if I can't, well, I guess it was a "transient."

Severity S2 - Critical S3 - Major

There are other ways to fix the problem that haven't been mentioned, so definitely not a critical bug, probably a minor bug and it's more likely to be a suggestion.

You can Exclude from measure count several measures without closing and opening the Measure properties window. Click "Apply" then click the arrow button to move to the next measure you want to change, make your change there, click apply and move to another measure and so forth.

I've noticed the behavior you don't like and it bothered me also. You make a change to a measure, click the arrow to get to another measure make a change to that and so forth without ever pressing Apply, but you do click OK to accept all of your changes. I expect all of the changes for all of the measures to take place at once. The actual result is that only the last change is made. Changing this behavior would be a suggestion I would agree with, but I do understand that the Apply button is there so you don't have to repeatedly open and close the properties window. BTW, the same thing happens in staff/part properties, so this is a consistent result in the program.

I would like to see those arrows automatically do an apply also. It's presumably a one-line change if everyone agrees it's always desirable.

Meanwhile, though, you don't say why you are trying to exclude may measures fro the numbering - this seems an extremely unusual thing to want to do - but perhaps a more direct way to achieve the actual goal would be to use a negative "Add to measure count" on the first measure you don't want excluded?

I personally have used it to create measure patterns of 3/4, 4/4, 3/4... It's also useful if you decided you excluded the wrong half of the measure from the count when you split a measure. There are probably other good uses for the feature, like making several consecutive measures invisible.

Oh, I get wanting the exclude measures in general, just wasn't sure about wanting multiple consecutive measures all excluded; I guess I wasn't clear about that. Having several invisible measures is a possibility, although here too I wonder about the use case and wonder if a horizontal frame isn't more what is actually wanted. Just curious. FWIW, it's probably possible to write an "exclude from measure count" plugin, if not, a command that could be added to a menu or made available for shortcut definition.

Severity S3 - Major S2 - Critical

Glad you asked: I'm MuseScore-ing the (non-scale) etudes in Carl Baermann's "Complete Method for Clarinet." To help ensure the accuracy of my transcriptions, I've numbered the initial measures in each row, just as MS does. In "#41 'Tarantella'," there are lots of eight bar repeats; just like MS, I don't double count the repeated measures. No problem, except for one of these eight bar sections calls for it to be played piano the first time through, forte the second. Based on prior experience with wanting a repeated section to be played one way the first time through, another the second time, the (only) way (I know) to accomplish this in MS is to actually enter the passage in full, twice (using cut-and-paste of course: I know I don't need to actually re-enter the whole section by hand, note-by-note) and mark the first eight bars piano, the second eight bars forte...which is a minor nuisance, but it doesn't come up very often, and thanks to cut-and-paste, isn't really a very big deal...except in this case, it messes up the correspondence between the measure count in MS and the measure count I painstakingly notated in the original score! (Yes, I know I could "fix" this by renumbering the measures in the score, but that's not the point, at least as far as I'm concerned: MS lets the user select multiple measures--or at least appears to--so if one has done so and then selects Measure Properties and makes changes, it's only natural to expect the changes to affect all the selected measures.)

Title "Exclude from measure count" not working/crashing Allow "Exclude from measure count" command for multiple measures at once
Severity S2 - Critical S5 - Suggestion
Status needs info active
Priority P2 - Medium

OK, so you're basically talking about wanting to exclude an unrolled repeat to match. And indeed, the workaround I gave above works. But indeed, it would be nice if there were other methods too. So since there does not in fact seem to be a bug (not that anyone has found steps to reproduce, anyhow) I'm leaving this open as a Suggestion for such a feature.

Severity S5 - Suggestion S2 - Critical
Status active needs info

Agreed, except that I think "the Feature Suggestion" might be more general than simply "exclude multiple measures at once": I haven't investigated the behavior of the other Measure Properties operations, but as a general rule, I think that if one has selected multiple items and then applies a change, one expects the change to affect all the selected items (which is consistent with the behavior after one has used "Select all similar items," for example), or if the program can't do that, it should at least raise a dialog informing the user of the limitation. So, I believe a new Feature Suggestion Issue should be opened, for "Enable/ensure measure operations on multiple measures to/that operate on all selected measures," or equivalent. If you agree but want me, as the original suggester, to open it, I'm willing (I'd make the wording less awkward, of course); otherwise I'll leave it to you to decide and do.

(Also, long term: is it in the cards to configure repeats with different performance instructions for each time through, to eliminate the need to "unroll" them, as that is, ultimately, the reason for my particular problem?)

Title Allow "Exclude from measure count" command for multiple measures at once Indeed,

I would agree it could be worth opening a separate features request regarding measure properties in general. I suspect the response to that one will be to implement a dialog saying "you can't do that" as otherwise there are difficult questions to answer about how to populate the fields initially, how to handle it if you then hit OK (should settings that were previously different between measures now be made the same), etc. We deal with that in the Inspector but it's a bit of work to manage - worth it because of how common and important those sorts of operations are. Not sure that would be as true of the settings in Measure Properties.

Have not tried this on any other scores, but the present file includes one bar of 11/4 recitative which should not be included in the overall measure count. "exclude" does not work. Period.
Okay, just tried on an old score: nichts. Select measure, go to measure properties, select exclude, apply, ok.
Nuttin'

Share the score in which this does not work. This issue here seems completly unrelated though, so better open a new forum post for that.