playing back from a specific bar or note, and NOT from the beginning of the whole piece

• Apr 19, 2013 - 23:45

Hi , i am new to musescore and quite enjoying it, but the biggest annoyance is an inconsistent ability to start playback on the bar or point where i am working. i tend to move from 'write' mode, place several notes into a bar, then go back into the 'play' mode. Then i replay whatever bar i'm on but shifting particular notes up or down in pitch etc to improve it. While i generally find musescore will start playback on a particular part of the score i'm working on commencing from any note highlighted in blue, it seems, ofter randomly, to resume playback at the very beginning, leaving me having to waste time re-finding my place. i find that clicking on the highlighted note in the place i want to start TWICE *normally* stops this annoying thing happening, but not always.
is there a failsafe way of always starting on any blue highlighted note that is where you are working, every time, without jumping at unexpected moments to he beginning of the score ? thanks if you can help.


Comments

Yes - turning off playback of repeats by clicking the repeat icon in the playback toolbar seems preventing this from happening. Do a search of these forums and you'll find other discussions of this issue that might provide other suggestions.

In reply to by adam12345

though heaven help you if you press the space bar (play shortcut) twice, or don't move the cursor (again !) to designate your starting point before you play again, as you will be thrown to the very start again. in my opinion musescore would be greatly improved just by allowing you to move a graphical tab around to particular places (perhaps labelled 'start point') to give you a designated start point when editing. That would be very simple, and surely a universally useful thing. Also i would include simple loop start and end markers that could be moved anywhere, and allow users to move notes around while it looped. Playback is very primitive and awkward on musescore, though I doubt Sibelius is much better. I feel that anyone who could make a score program that had simple timeline functions (such as temporary start and stop points and a loop function) of the kind found in audio software such as Logic or protools would be very successful. That's just an opinion : )

In reply to by adam12345

Tese sort of playback improvements have been suggested before and are under consideration; I think 2.0 might already have some of them implemented. But you must keep in mind, MuseScore is a notation program first and foremost. It's playback features are indeed relatively primitive, because that is not its main function. Something to keep in mind to help you set your expectations. Playback improvements always get lower priority than notation improvements. If you really need complex looping and so forth, that's what sequencers are for. So the usual workflow would be to create your score in MuseScore, export to MIDI, then do all your playback manipulations in a sequencer.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks for those comments. i will have a look at the improvements in the latest musescore. Also i have not yet really explored the scoring functions in logic, which i think has some notation capability, which might be useful if you can import to and from musescore. The best way may be to actually compose in Logic, but create a good graphical score for printout in musescore. Musescore has good graphical features enabling you to create a well laid out printed graphical end product, but may be less oriented to editing with playback..

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