Incorrect beaming in 5/4 time
I am working on a composition that shifts constantly between 4/4 and 5/4 time. Everything beamed perfectly until now. When I dropped a 5/4 marking onto a staff where I wanted that time signature (the staff had already 4 beats filled in with eighth notes), the beaming for those eighth notes was incorrect. It automatically beamed 6 eighth notes (instead of 4) together, then followed by 4. No amount of undo's and redo's fixed it. The only thing I could do to fix it was to go to beam properties and manually apply the fix. Sixteenth notes do the same thing, except it beams 12 of them.
Shouldn't eighth and sixteenth notes in 5/4 time be beamed in 4's and 2's?
As a test, I went ahead and put in more eighth notes in the next measure, still in 5/4 time. It did it again--beaming 6 notes instead of 4, like it's supposed to. Going into beam properties is the only way to fix it, but I don't want to have to keep doing that every time; it'd be a hassle, something that composition is not supposed to be.
Is there any way to fix this besides going into beam properties every time?
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Comments
Sadly no :(
The problem with odd time signatures is that there are many ways of beaming the bar, and currently there is no way of defining that in MuseScore.
Beaming support is better in 2.0 but I don't know whether you can define the split as it has never occured to me to test that :)
Personally I would put up with MuseScore's strange beaming until I'd finished the piece and then go back and put it how I want it.
FWIW, while there really aren't any universal standards for beaming in 5/4 time, beaming in groups of three beats followed by two is probably the most common in my experience. So I wouldn't call MuseScore's default "wrong" - it's probably thebest choice overall. But indeed, not what you want all the time. Luckily, there is mo need to actual use the beam palette to change beaming - that's what keyboard shortcuts are for. edit / preferences / shortcuts lets you define or redefine shortcuts for most commands. I have "start of beam" and "middle of beam" set to adjacent keys on my keyboard, so the moment I enter a note that MuseScore beams where I didn't want, or fails to beam where I did, It,s a single keypress to override.