Only tenor part saved?

• Jan 16, 2020 - 10:15

I made a big band score and wanted to make a part of the tenor 1 voice. But after I did that I can no longer find the big band score, I can only find the tenor voice and not the whole score. I has completely disappeared.. i can't find it using the "Recover files" thread either. Can anyone help?


Comments

I can guess what might have happened.

When you generated the part, did you then go view the part, and then use "Save As"? This would indeed save the part only. Hopefully you gave it a different name/folder, so the original score is still there, under the original name/folder. If not, MuseScorew would have warned you that you were about to overwrite the file, and in that case, if you answered yes, I'm afraid MsueScore did what you told it.

If you're on Windows and in a OneDrive folde,r you can go to OneDrive online and recover an older version that way. macOS may have something similar.

It's surprising to me that "Save" saves the score as a whole and "Save As" either saves the score or extracts the current part, depending on your current view. Seeing "Save" and "Save As" next to each other in the menu, I assume it's the same material being saved in either case - that "Save As" to the same filename has the same behavior as "Save", and while it does overwrite the file, so does saving!

This intuition is supported by the "Open/Save/Export/Print" MuseScore Basics page (https://musescore.org/en/handbook/opensaveexportprint), which says:

Save: Save current score to file.
Save As...: Save current score to new file.

There's no indication that "Save As" has a special contextual behavior, or that using Save As can lose work. At minimum, a warning seems appropriate, as this isn't the first user to be surprised (e.g. https://musescore.org/en/node/272925)

In reply to by DoubleMark

^This! It's easy to forget that Save As only saves the part that's being viewed, rather than the whole document. And someone that doesn't know this could Save As and not realize why only the one part is there when they reopen the file, since there's no indicator other than the "-[part name]", which could easily go unnoticed if they are typing a new file name or overwriting an existing file.

Saving parts as separate files would be better IMO if there were a Save Part As function or if it were integrated into the Export Parts function.

In reply to by Tristan H

This is true, but we really don't expect that anyone would want to save the part separately, that should be an incredibly rare operation (I don't know that I've done this once in the five years or so we've had linked parts). And we don't want to mislead people into thinking that they need to save their part separately, which is what could happen if they see a menu item by that name. Could be better to have a warning dialog if you try to save as from a part that specifically tells you this is what is going to happen, and offers to save the score instead.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Yes, but what if you you really do want to save just a single part? And you want it to be in MSCZ format? Export Parts seems wrong for that on both counts. So I do see the need for saving a part individually, I just share the concern that it's too easy to do this accidentally right now.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Whether or not export parts can save as MSCZ, I personally would never think to try, because I have a sense of export meaning, to a "foreign" format. And it still doesn't address the desire to save only a single part.

I suggested the confirmation dialog on Save As above, I like that approach somewhat better than changing the behavior of the current command and adding a new one to get the old behavior. But I don't really care much one way or the other.

Oh, and for the record: File / Export offsets MSCX but not MSCZ. File / Export Parts offers both.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

This makes sense, so that "Save as" is consistent throughout the whole app, rather than being contextual. As a user, I expect a command to consistently do the same thing, no matter where in the app I am, or what I am doing.

"Export" doesn't necessarily have to mean "File export from one to another" but it can be viewed as, in common English and not from the point of view of a programmer - "Extract this subset out of the larger thing I'm working with", like a part from a score. "Export parts" is perfect wording for this scenario, or "Save part as..."

Lots of programs, like Notepad, Photoshop, and MSPaint, will show "Save as type" as a dropdown in the prompt showing conversion across multiple file formats - so there is already precedent for "Save as" allowing for conversion between different file formats, rather than a specific "Export" option in the menu.

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