Keyboard shortcuts to increase and decrease velocity
Isn't this sort of the most urgent addition that's pending? As of right now, you need to go note by note: select it, change the velocity type if required, then select the text box below, erase the current value, enter one you believe would work, and then either press escape or select the following note directly.
You need to do this for every single note, one at a time, and then you end up with a mess and the more you try to fix it the worse it gets, because at the end of the day you are just guessing values.
It takes forever and the results are terrible, so you end up just leaving it up to MS to set all velocities automatically and at most you change the worst one or two, but ultimately you have no overall control in practice.
Ideally we should be able to see a plot of all velocities and edit them from there, but I know it's unrealistic for a user to ask for such a thing. But there's at least a reasonable improvement, which is simply to implement keyboard shortcuts to increase and decrease the velocity for any number of selected notes at once. That way we could listen, edit with a reasonable effort, listen again, correct with a reasonable effort, and repeat until we get the desired result.
Comments
If you want the velocities to be the same, then you can select all the notes you want and change them all at once in the inspector. But this should never be necessary. If you use a dynamic to p (velocity = 49) for example and apply it to a note, as long as you don't change anything, all succeeding notes stay at 49 until there is another dynamic change. If your goal is to make a crescendo or decrescendo, then enter it with a proper way of telling the program what you want and it will happen automatically.
I suspect that part of your issue is that you have imported a midi score and there is a velocity on each note. To fix that, see the info at https://musescore.org/en/node/277424. For info concerning dynamics in general and how to make them work, see https://musescore.org/en/node/290616. As stated in this document. This works for all dynamic marks and has since version 2.
If these don't help you, then attach a score and explain what you are trying to do.
If your file is from MIDI import, then indeed, resetting the velocities sounds like it would be what you want. By default we honor the original velocity info, but that's not always what you want, so the reset is there for those cases.
If it wasn't from MIDI import, then we'd want to understand why you are feeling the "need" to change velocity info note by note. Normally you'd just add dynamic markings and the playback follows the dynamics automatically. If you are saying you just want more fine-tuning control over the playback, the Inspector is available, also the Piano Roll Editor. Also there is the possibility of a plugin automating some particular tasks.
But, realize MuseScore is first and foremost a notation program. Fine-tuning of playback is nice to have where possible but is extremely far from being the "most urgent addition".
In reply to If your file is from MIDI… by Marc Sabatella
I think it's worthwhile to implement a more efficient tool, because some composers need to hear along with the music in order to best create, and so the more beautiful and human that the music can be rendered by the program, the more that composer can access their muse. Think about composers who are dyslexic in some way related to being able to imagine the notes.
Thank you both for your replies. Indeed I was working with a midi import. No two notes had the same velocity and this led me to believe this was a necessity in order to achieve a decent sound (and aside from not knowing that constant velocities don't sound "artificial", I was also unaware there was a way to reset them all at once). The problem I had was that the loudest parts were just too loud, to the point were the "player" was banging on the piano, and I was trying to lower them one by one while trying to preserve their proportions approximately. That turned out to be a mess in itself, but also, it was impossible to get a smooth transition from the parts I had edited to the parts left untouched.
Anyway, this works just fine, with the inspector you can normalize the whole score and then work with dynamic markings from there and the results are more than satisfactory. You could turn back to the inspector only for one or two specific values here or there.
Again, thanks to the both of you.
In reply to Thank you both for your… by Boente
Very good summary of what we told you. You're welcome and don't hesitate to ask if you find anything else that seems too difficult, there's probably an easier way.