Changing measure duration from plugin

• Oct 21, 2011 - 13:26

For singing pieces, the size of a measure is determined more by the text than the overall measure duration.
I would like to make a plugin that removes the rests at the end of a measure by "resizing" the measure.

However, is it possible to change the actual measure length from a plugin? It's the value from Measue->Measure Properties->Measure Duration->Actual.
I was unable to find it in the documentation.


Comments

In reply to by [DELETED] 5

I've added a short section of "our father", just as a generic and recognisable example. You see that there actually isn't a measure per se. A time signature just doesn't have any meaning, since the timing is determined by the meter of the text.

You enter this in musescore, it will create rests, or worse, a tie (syncope). Next, I'm constantly counting notes and entering them as the actual measure duration.

In the example I have an actual duration of
- 1st measure: 11 / 8
- 2nd measure: 9 / 8
- 3rd measure: 3 / 4
- 4th measure: 16 / 8
etc.etc.

You see this is a lot of work and should be easy to automate. Just choose an improbably large time signature and have the plugin shrink the measures to size afterwards.

P.S. After this is made into a plug-in I'm going to work on two more:
- Automatically hiding time signatures, bar lines, and other stuff that is irrelevant for singing pieces.
- Automatically remove beams, because in singing beams are only used when two or more notes are sung for the same syllable. It's easier to add beams then to remove them.

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Onze Vader.mscz 2.33 KB

In reply to by asciimonster_

FWIW, the conventions you cite are by no means universal for all singing pieces. Really, just a fairly specific style of liturgical music. Most vocal music *does* use time signatures, and beams.

But yeah, for that specific liturgical style, I do agree that an automatic method of setting the actual duration of measures would be nice. Really, this is just another way of saying you want a way to easily create music without time signatures, and that's a pretty common request. I personally think MuseScore should eventually be extended in a way to make this possible more directly, rather than rely on a plugin to cleanup after the fact. It's a clever idea, though, but unfortunately, the plug in architecture really doesn't allow for this or anything else on the list of things you mention wanting to do.

Having preferences for beaming defaults is another pretty popular request I hope to see implemented some day. But meanwhile, doesn't doing a select all followed by double clicking the "no beam" icon in the beam properties palette already do what you want in terms of breaking all beams after the fact?

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