Six suggestions
Hello, over the last few days of trying out MS, I've been writing down some suggestions for possible improvements of future versions, please find them below
- any help to beginning musicians will come in really handy for them, for instance having the note name displayed somewhere in the MS window when the mouse is hovered over the stave, so that the user knows, for each possible position of the note on the stave (mouse cursor = blue note), what note that would correspond to
- it would be very useful to have a shortcut (say, Ctrl+Space) that does "Play from beginning of file"
- right now, when using the alphabetic keyboard to input notes, the octave of the note is guessed as the one that's nearest to the previous note entered. This isn't optimal, and a simple improvement of this algorithm can lead to a lot less use of Ctrl+(up/down) to correct the octave manually and thus a lot of saved time. The improvement of this algorithm would be based on the observation that in music in general, certain notes tend to be repeated quite often, and if the user inserts, say, an E note for every other 2 notes, then it's quite likely that that E will always be in the same octave, even though, judging by the "nearest last note" algorithm, the guess would be E's that are in different octaves
- it would be good to have an option to have each measure numbered, rather than just the first measure of each row; I looked for such an option in Preferences but could not see one
- it would be nice to also have an option to have the line that divides the measures be continuous from the top of the upper stave (in a piano sheet) to the bottom of the lower stave, rather than always have short bar lines that only extend the height of a single stave
- I tried performing an operation (doubling the duration) upon a selection of two non-contiguous notes: I clicked on the first note, held down Ctrl, clicked on the second one, then clicked the appropriate note duration button. This didn't have any effect. It would be really nice to do that.
Comments
Good suggestions! A couple are already there, though:
-You can set measure numbers every bar in style / edit general style / numbers, set the interval to 1.
- Barlines can be extended between staves by double clicking one then dragging the handle down. But actually, piano staves should be set up that way by default, assuming you created them as a single instrument with two staves rather than two instruments of one staff each. So I'm guessing maybe you created your score some other way? Anyhow, even so, double click and dragging the handle does the trick.
- A lot of operations do work on non-contiguously-selected notes - like transposing, etc. But indeed, not everything.
- it would be very useful to have a shortcut (say, Ctrl+Space) that does "Play from beginning of file"
There is an icon for this purpose among the ‘Transport Tools’ of the Toolbar that should appear by defalt near the top of your screen. (When you you hover your mouse over it, it should say ‘Rewind to start position’.)
If you’d like a keyboard shortcut to do the same thing, you could create one yourself. Go to the Shortcuts tab in Edit > Preferences, where the action to which you would assign a keyboard shortcut to is called ‘Player rewind’.
Either way, though, you still have to initiate the actual playback yourself -- so I guess this only gives you half of what you’re seeking! Still, I hope it helps.
Sorry for the delay in my reply. Thank you very much for these solutions, they were really helpful!
I hope that, of my suggestions, those that did not have an immediate workaround (i.e. the first, third and last one) will be considered by the developers for perhaps implementation in a future version. Many thanks.