Instrument change produces incorrect Mixer details

Not sure I understand what you mean. Adding the text is only the first step to changing instrument - you then have to right click the text to define what instrument you actually want to change to. Once you do this, everything is as it should be as far as I can tell. Playback changes at that spot, and mixer shows entries for both instruments, both labelled correctly (harpsichord for staff name for both, harpsichord for sound for first entry, whatever you changed it to for the second). And the two entries both work properly as far as how playback responds to fiddling with the dials.

Maybe you just mean, if for some reason you open the mixer after adding the text but before actually defining what instrument you want to change to, it shows a dummy entry. Not sure that's worth worrying about? Or if so, it's got to be extremely minor.

If you do for whatever reason decide to display the mixer prematurely - while in that incompletely-entered state between when you add the text and when you actually select the instrument - the mixer display and sound are uninitialized and seem to be somewhat random. For me, they often seem to reflect whatever instrument I happened to have used last.

But sure, using a more predictable placeholder does make sense for those few people who might happen to prematurely look at the mixer.

I get that this is what you are trying to do. i don't get *why*. It seems pretty clear to me the instrument chanfe is designed to be used with a very specific dialog tos elect the instrument. I don't get why you think it should be supported to bypass that dialog - what advantage you think bypassing it conveys. You seem to be trying to make a distinction between changing instrument versus changing sound, but changing sound is all the instrument change does.

As I mentioned elsewhere, i think placing an Instrument change should force you to pick the instrument right then and there, using the actual instrument change dialog. That would simplify use of the facility, and eliminate the possibility of misuse.

The problem is though Marc when you are actually changing patches within an instrument - Chen's keyboard synth is an example, as is pipe organ, once I have finished tweaking Jeux. Hammonds will also be a case in point - in fact any instrument capable of preset sound modifications within itself, and thus likely to require a specialist soundfont.

In these cases the name in the Instrument list will not correlate to the patch name in the mixer.

Unless of course you want to complicate the instrument list still further by adding every patch name to it.

I would say that actually it would be preferable for the Instrument change dialogue to open the mixer rather than the instrument list.

This would cater for users with custom soundfonts which don't conform to the GM standard.

You must agree that it makes little sense to choose say Violin from the instrument list when you are performing an organ stop change when you are actually specifying Positive Reeds!

The point about instrument names not always corresponding to patch names in the mixer is a good one. So I certainly can see that at some time after the instrument change element is added, it may be necessary to use the mixer to change the sound further. This would sometimes be true for "real" instruments too - eg, if you want to use this mechanism to have the violin switch from arco to pizz, this currently can't be done from the instrument list. And this might lead one to want to go to the Mixer first.

On the other hand, the patch list in the mixer is very poorly structured compared to the actual Instrument list. For example, if you are trying to indicate a switch from saxophone to flute, good luck finding it. So I don't think having the Mixer come up automatically is the way to go in general.

I could see a sort of dual dialog come up, where you selected the instrument and the left (and it would default to the current instrument - so perhaps "organ" in your case) and then the patch on the right. Of course, something like that could be just as useful for the main insteument selection dialog in the new score wizard.

Anyhow, I now understand better the reason for going to the Mixer. So one way or another that should be possible and should work. Right now, it's not really clear how this is all supposed to fit together.

Looking at a fix where instrument is explicitly set to whatever the "current" instrument at that point in the score is, so placing an Instrument Change without immediately going to the Change Instrument dialog is effectively a no-op, rather than leaving the score in an undetermined state.

https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/687/

Code is probably fine, actually, but Travis build fails in a way that looks unrelated to my change - could be Travis is just sick overall.

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.