Selecting notes with Shift + mouse drag in chords

• Apr 1, 2014 - 03:12

1) Open the default demo score, Bilder einer Ausstellung
2) Select the lowest notes of the third bar (g a g f d) by drawing a selection box with Shift + drag
3) Try deleting the notes with Del key or transposing them with the arrow keys or Ctrl+C copying them anywhere else

You can't delete/transpose/copy but the whole chords the notes belong to.
Of course this happens in every similar situation.

(This happens both in stable version and 2.0.0 Rev 8917b06, the latest nightly build I've found.)

Wouldn't it be more logical (and useful) if delete/transpose/copy/everything else worked just on the selected notes? :)


Comments

In reply to by ciacnorris

I think expectations are dependent on situation. There is a special relationship between notes, chords, and time in music, and in many cases, you *want* everything that is "musically" within a selected region to be selected if it isn't technically within the scope of the box you draw. Not saying it *has* to be this way, but if drag-select were changed to only select the elements actually within the box as opposed to elements "musically" contained in that region, other operations that one might expect to work that way wouldn't, or would require more work anyhow.

Anyhow, I just wanted to make sure you were aware there is a distinction in MuseScore. Some selection methods select *regions of music* - everything between a given start and end time position for a given staff or staves - and other selection methods select *individual elements*, perhaps discontiguously. So it's a matter of choosing the right tool for the job. Right now, I guess drag-select selects individual elements if not notes are involved, but as soon as notes are included, it switches to region. At least, that seems to be how it works. Again, not saying it couldn't be different, but then it wouldn't work in the cases where you have the opposite expectation.

Anyhow, improving the selection facility for MuseScore is something of interest to many of us, and hopefully a future release will contain improvements in this area.

In reply to by ciacnorris

wouldn't hurt to have it in the issue tracker, maybe include a link to this discussion.

"More flexible selection facility" was one of the suggested ideas for MuseScore for Google Summer of Code. It's too early to say if any of the submitted proposals were based on this idea of if any of them will be selected, but it's at least *possible* that someone might be working on selection improvements this summer.

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