Where do scoes get saved?

• Dec 9, 2016 - 15:14

I have a nuisance that when I press save for
the score that I am working on,
it unpredictably saves it in documents/Musescore/scores or
in the folder in my tree where I loaded it from.
I always want it to go where it came from.
There must be a setting somewhere?


Comments

In reply to by Shoichi

I don't understand the handbook,
It looks like one has to tell it to put all the scores in the same folder.
I want a score to go back where it came from, which
it sometimes does.
And that place is variable.

In reply to by mike320

This is a feature I have wanted for a very long time, although I don't believe I have ever posted about it, so I was very excited to hear that there may be a solution.

I immediately tried it and it does not work as requested.

It opens the default location.

Very disappointing.

In reply to by xavierjazz

Ah. That makes sense potentially, depending on one's working / organizational method. The method you describe is suited for a scheme where, for example, you have lots of compositions, each in its own folder, but each composition has multiple versions, like one a lead sheet, a couple for different jazz combos, one for big band, etc. So if you open the jazz combo version of composition X with the intent of creating a new version for a vocal ensemble, you will want it in the same folder. The current algorithm - where Save As reuses the last folder - is more suited to an organization scheme where you keep all your lead sheets in one folder, all your combo charts in another, all your big band charts in another, etc. That way, if you are working on a bunch of charts for a given ensemble for an upcoming gig, they all save to the same place by default regardless of what type of score you started from.

Would be interesting to hear more about different people's workflows to understand the different behaviors that might be optimal for them. Like for example, is your use case similar to what I suggested above, or do you have some other unique reason to want it to work that way?

In reply to by mike320

My mistake. "Save as..." opens some quasi random folder that it has chosen. What I described above is normal for most windows apps.

I did a little testing and found that MS seems to open the last folder I saved to, even if I close and reopen MS. Since I don't know all the code for selecting a folder I can't explain how it decides.

I don't understand what you mean. If you open an exisitng score, then edit it and press Save (as opposed to Save As", it *does* save to the original location. Only exception I know about is if you didn't actually open the file from the original location but instead were recovering an auto-save version of the file after a previous crash.

If you think you have encountered a case where a file is being saved to a different location that what you opened, please say what OS, what version of MuseScore, and give precise steps to reproduce the problem.

The setting in Edit / Preferences is just there to give a default location for new scores, it in no way forces you to save scores there or affects the location for any scores already created & saved.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Marc,

An example I can think of when someone might want to know where the score came from is when someone e-mails them a score and they open it from their e-mail. The e-mail server will put a copy of it on your computer so you can look at it. If you make a change to it so you can send it back, MS doesn't tell you where it is saving it. I don't know where my e-mail program would put it because I never looked. Now, where is the file so you can send it back to your friend. I know how I would go about finding it, but I'm very good at figuring things out. I realize that there are things I could do in my sample scenario to find it, even using MuseScore to help, so don't concentrate too much on that, rather look at the principle. There are a lot of people with less knowledge about the overall working of their computer than you and I do who would want to find where their score is saved for a variety of reasons. In most Windows programs I use, if I select save as for a document it will open the folder that the document came from. If I make a document from scratch it will open the default location.

In reply to by mike320

Good point. In these case, ideally, the file would be opened in the same state as, for example, a score imported from MusicXML or an older version of MuseScore - or a new score - so that "save" is automatically treated as "Save As". Not sure how MuseScore could know the difference, though. And I suspect every email program and every OS handles this a bit differently. With Inbox on Windows 10, there isn't even the *option* of opening an attaching directly; you are forced to save the attachment to an explicit location. So there is none of this mystery tempo folder business that plagues users of other systems.

Anyhow, it's still the case that "Save" goes to the same location the file came from - it's just that in some cases, you probably don't want that. Other than the specific case I mentioned (recovery post crash) I don't know of any case where "save" in fact goes somewhere else. A way to *find out* the current save location would be useful, but I wouldn't assume that changing the behavior of "save as" is the only or best way of doing that.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I am not understanding the discussion. I'm starting again.
I open only one score in MuseScore. I modify it and then I press save.
I want that score to be saved in the folder that I opened it from.
If I want to save it to a different folder I want to press save-as and tell it where.
I don’t want it saved to documents/MuseScore/scores without my save-as.
There must be an overall setting to prevent this?

In reply to by hill0093

If you do exactly what you said:

1) start MuseScore
2) open a score (say, using File / Open)
3) modify it
4) press "Save"

Then it *will* be saved in the same folder as the original - the original file is indeed overwritten, same as pretty much as every other application ever.

The only exception is if the score is actually *imported* - eg, a MusicXML file, or a score created with MuseScore 1.x. In that case - again, as with most other applications - attempting to "save" the file gets converted to "save as" because you can't literally save an imported file in its original format. In this case, the folder used is the same folder you used last time, just as for other "Save As" operations.

So I can only assunme you aren't talking about opening a normal MuseScore 2 file but are instead talking about this special case you are in fact *importing* a score from another source, and thus your "save" is actually a "save as".

As I explained above, the current "save as" behavior this is exactly what one wants half the time, exactly what one doesn't the rest. There is no way MuseScore can predict which times are which.

In general, if you spend a lot of time importing files, maybe better to do that via a shell script / batch file.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

No, you are wrong.
1) start MuseScore
2) open a score using File / Open
3) modify it
4) press "Save"
Then sometimes it *will* be saved in the same folder as the original.
And the original file is overwritten like I want.
But other times it goes unpredictably into documents/musescore2/scores.

In reply to by hill0093

I sometimes have the same problem, also with windows 10.
But I found out when it go's to musescore2/documents
1/ if I open a file by double clicking on it, modify it and then press save
2/ when i'm working on a score, but stop for awhile working on the pc until it go's in sleep modus, and start it again

In reply to by hill0093

As I said, the only time that will happen is if the score you open at step 2 is in fact not a native MuseScore 2 score but is instead imported from some other format (or an older version of MuseScore). In that case, when you press "Save" at step 4, it will not save immediately at all, because MsueScorwe 2 cannot save natively into the same format that it imported. Instead, your "Save" will be turned into a "Save As" and will thus pop up a file dialog that prompts you to choose a location for the brand new MuseScore 2 file you are thus creating. The default location will be the last folder you did a "Save As" into. If you prefer to save your brand new MuseScore 2 file into the same folder as the file you imported, simply change to that folder.

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