lack of courtesy accidentals creates problems for ties vs slurs.
This is basically a request for the courtesy accidental feature. I've been having problems with music I've annotated in MuseScore when it comes to rehearsing / performance.
Basically all the players really need courtesy accidentals.
Whilst I can argue that an accidental should disappear with a barline, it's much more difficult when it comes to tied vs slurred notes.
For example if you're in Cmajor, and you have a whole note F# tied over the barline, the second bar doesn't show the accidental when it's a tie.
It does show the second accidental if you used a slur rather than a tie.
So this creates an ambiguity - "am I looking at an F# slurred to an F nat, or a tied F# ?"
Fundamentally ties are not visually distinct enough from slurs, so someone looking at this might think it's an F# reverting to an F natural. The results are not particularly pleasing usually.
If people could rely on courtesy accidentals, they could view the lack of the natural accidental as indication that the # accidental is retained.
A related bug is that if you have a score, with parts, if you add an accidental to the score, it's not copied into the part. This is very painful (also see this with slurs)
Cheers
Adrien
Comments
MuseScore supports courtesy accidentals already. Simply add them using the toolbar, anywhere you'd like. When you mention ties, I assume you mean a note *after* the tied note - it would be very non-standard, and not really helpful, to include it on the actual tied note. An F# slurred to an F natural in the next bar would show the explicit courtesy natural on the F natural. Without the courtesy natural, it is understood that this is a tie and that the F# carries over, which is why published music virtually never includes such courtesy accidentals - except across line breaks. In any case, you can add courtesy accidentals to tied notes whether it is across a line break or not, same way you add them for non-tied notes. Although prior to 2.1, this didn't work, so be sure you have the latest version.
Not sure what you mean about parts. Adding a courtesy accidental to a note in the score most definitely affects the part normally. If you have a score where this appears to not work,. please attach it and give precise steps to reproduce the problem.
In reply to MuseScore supports courtesy by Marc Sabatella
Sorry I obviously wasn't clear.
I don't want to have to manually add each accidental. This is a job ideally suited for a computer.
I didn't mean notes after a tied note. I meant the tied note itself.
Yes, it's not normal to put another accidental on. But
![ambiguity.png]( "ambiguity.png")
shows 2 cases.
In top stave bar 1 is Fnat and so is bar 2.
In bottom stave, bar 1 is Fnat and 2nd is F#
See the problem? a slur looks only very slightly different to a tie. If MS was automatically putting in courtesy accidentals, the second stave 2nd bar would show a courtesy sharp symbol.
I've been playing music for 40 years and only found there is a difference between a tie and a slur recently. I'm not the only one surely. It's not feasible to get all players to know the difference - change the way they read music, just to cope with lack of proper courtesy accidentals.
If I have to take a manual action (add accidental) to resolve ambiguities like this, if I miss one then when it comes to playing it, there are real problems, whereas it sounds fine when synthesized so I can't hear a problem in MS.
As for parts vs score. Many elements seem to be copied into the part from the score and vice versa when either is edited. I can understand some meta data about elements is different between part and score (e.g. position), but surely not existence?
Adrien
In reply to Sorry I obviously wasn't by Adrien de Croy
There is a plugin that can add courtesy accidentals automatically - see https://musescore.org/en/project/courtesyaccidentals. Hopefully a future release will incorporate this functionality in a native form.
As for parts, as I said, when you add a courtesy accidental, it *does* add it to both the score and parts. At least it does normally, and I've added thousands fo these and never once seen it fail to work. But if you have some specific score where it does not, please attach it so we can see what might be going wrong.
In reply to There is a plugin that can by Marc Sabatella
I'll see if I can set up a simple score to demonstrate.
It may be related to having multiple staves mapped to a single part. I use separate staves for solo lines for an orchestral part, and then combine the staves into the say 1st vlns part.
But in many cases I've spent hours going through the score adding courtesy accidentals manually to the score, and only to find they weren't put in the parts so I have to also go through each part individually. It's very painful.
I've also got many instances where I've pasted a big chunk into a score (including slurs) which has existing parts mapped only to find the slurs didn't make it through to the parts.
As far as I can tell there are at least the following things that are maintained as copies between score and parts:
* slurs
* courtesy accidentals
* tremolo
Basically IMO there should be nothing done this way (except maybe brackets). The score should be the single authority on what exists, and parts are a view of the score, allowing overridden position and other necessary attributes.
In reply to I'll see if I can set up a by Adrien de Croy
There is a known bug where slurs sometimes get lost in parts on copy/paste - see #189736: On copy/paste measure(s) with slur(s) in score, the slur(s) get(s) lost in part. So hopefully that will be fixed. But I'm not aware of any issue with accidentals or tremolo, so do let us know if you find a way to reproduce a problem.