Alteration idiocy
1.jpg why is there a flat sign on the second d when the first d is already flat?
2.jpg why is there a natural sign on the second d when the first d is already natural?
In my classical piano training, if I have an alteration mark at the beginning of a measure, all other notes in that measure from left to right have to behave like the first one if they are all d notes for example.
It makes absolutely no sense for alteration marks to appear everywhere if the first note of that kind is already altered.
6952215 Windows XP
This is an other iteration of my other issue called "Alterations not consistent" which nobody seems to have understood.
Am I being that complicated here?
Comments
How did you create these scores? Asking why is not helpful...
Just to give some more information on how those two occurred, in the case of the first one I just put a natural alteration mark on the first d and that gave the second d a flat alteration mark which shouldn't happen, because if the first d is naturalized, so should the second one be as well. The even weirder thing is that when I apply a flat alteration mark to the first d the mark actually appears instead of just deleting the normalize sign because there is already a flat d alteration mark from the key signature.
However, if I hit ctrl-Z to this last action, the d flat alteration mark moves to the second d note. Weird.
In the case of the second photo, it happened that when I selected the second d and added a naturalize alteration mark, the mark also appeared for the first d note. I have absolutely no idea why. And the weirder thing is I can't reproduce the thing now, I have no idea how I did it, I hope I'll bump into it again.
I can reproduce the first issue though, and I think the second photo is tied to the first one anyways.
Wow, that's weird, I only received your comment via e-mail now at 12:09 my time (London time) even though you posted some 25 minutes before. Why does it take so long for stuff to get to people via e-mail?
Also, I posted my second comment explaining the problem without seeing your comment, so I posted that unaware of yours.
I think it's a feature actually. If you enter two D flat and there is already a D flat in the key signature, you expect them to have no flat. And that's what happen.
Then you add a natural to the first D. It add the natural and put a flat in front of the second D flat. The main principle is "MuseScore will not change the pitch of a note without you instructing it to do so". If you want the second D to be natural as well, select it and press the up arrow key. It will be come a D natural and will not have a natural in front.
Using the toolbar flat, natural and sharp instead of up and down key will force MuseScore to really add an accidental sign in front of the note, for courtesy purpose for example. That's why you are seein the natural in front of the second note.
So I wonder is it idiocy? or misunderstanding?
Well it is an idiocy because it is extremely unproductive and highly counter-intuitive, because you have to keep on manually editing all notes and it wastes a lot of time.
And besides, this is NOT how a normal score should behave, it goes against basic principles in the theory of music.
Sorry, no misunderstanding on this side.
At least one of the two alteration methods should be consistent with basic music theory taught throughout the world.
I fail to understand how it's not consistent with basic music theory... If you add a natural to the first note, but not the second note, the second note should have a flat to cancel the natural and remain flat... That's the way basic theory work...If you want to change the first and second notes, you need to change both and the first one will get a natural and the second one nothing.
On a score if the first note has an alteration, the second note of the same pitch will follow the first note, that's it.
And if I recall correctly that's how Sibelius and Finale work as well.
It is SO much work to edit a score the way MuseScore works now because you have to manually edit so many individual notes in one measure.
If I add a natural to the first note, but not to the second note, the second note shouldn't remain flat if it is of the same pitch as the first one, it should follow along the lines of the first note's alteration, unless I explicitly want the second note to remain flat or anything else.
So it's actually the other way around.
I think it depends on your workflow. The behavior in note entry has been changed recently. See http://musescore.org/en/node/7284
After a long discussion, they have been a consensus to keep the behavior of not modifying following notes when you edit a score, mainly because it would be unexpected for the majority of people but to respect the rules of "measure accidentals" in note entry. Add your voice to the discussion if you want. It's better to ban "idiocy" and "consistency with basic music theory taught throughout the world" to keep the discussion constructive though.
If you need to edit a lot of music this way, you might do something wrong when you enter your music in the first place. It could be useful to describe your workflow on the forum. You might also not know that you can edit not quickly with left/right and up/down arrows (?).
I close this issue. Let's reopen it if the concensus in http://musescore.org/en/node/7284 changes
I feel offended that you consider me such an idiot when inputting notes.
Of course I know about the left right and all of that, but it's so counter-productive.
I didn't know that there is a forum thread for this issue, I'll post to it.
But hey, let's have the best of both worlds: let's have one input method (be it the left right arrows or mouse pointing) not change subsequent notes and have the other one do so.
Then you can satisfy both camps.
(BTW, please look into my history, I'm a long time MuseScore user and have contributed many bug reports.)
Are you perhaps using the accidentals palette to enter the accidentals? That would produce the results you are seeing. Accidentals entered by the palette are *meant* to appear whether or needed or not. These are called curtesy accidentals, and there needs to be a way to enter them. So if you deliberately used the accicdentals palette to add a flat to the second note even though it is not needed, then indeed, MuseScore does what you asked and displayed it even though it is not needed. This capability is necessary to provide in order to allow people to enter courtesy accidentals as desired - MuseScore cannot be in the business of not displaying accidentals you explicitly add.
If you just want to change the pitch of a note and have an accidental appear only as needed, that's what the arrow keys are for. Then, the usual rules of notation will be used to determined if an accidental needs to be displayed or not.
If perhaps you are *not* using the accidentals palette in this manner, then it would help if you provided more detail as to *exactly* (step by step) what you are doing to produce these results.
EDIT:
Actually, on further reading of the exchange, I think my above comments may be in error. You are saying that you first entered two Db's then you changed one of those Db to D natural, and you expected the other one to change to D natural as well even though you never touched it. I would argue this would be *highly* undesirable and unexpected to most people. You only clicked one note, so only that note should be affected. It would be kind of disastrous in many cases if clicking one note and modifying it had the unintended side effect of also modifying other notes you never touched.
However, I do certainly see the value of also having a special mode where adding an accidental *does* modify notes you never touched - this mimics the way it works with paper and pencil, where adding a single accidental does indeed potentially modifying more than one note. Again, no way should that be the default, as it would make editing scores very difficult (in order to fix one note, you'd constantly have to scan the rest of the measure to make sure you didn't inadvertenly affect other notes). But for the cases where you are simply typing in manuscript and left out an accidental and thus actually entered the wrong pitch several times and therefore *want* to be able to fix them all all once, this would be helpful.
Sorry; I seem to have also missed the fact that discussion is moving.
Notation input software should work as a WYSIWYG copy of hand writing something on paper. Of course if you want fancy exceptions that's fine, but those should not be default.
I don't care if lasconic has moved the discussion, I'm not done here.
That discussion on that other thread is way too long for my time.
Agreed, but you might want to start another thread, then, focusing on just this issue. Preferably without using words like "idiocy".
Anyhow, you might not be done here, but I am. I will happily discuss the issue with you in the forum, and will respond to any post that is purely technical in nature and refrains from insults.