Save Online also affected by unintuitive "Concert pitch" behaviour
(post contains content relevant to the Documentation forum, but I took the liberty to putting everything in one place)
= background =
I forgot to disable "Concert Pitch" before uploading and found that it kept the Concert Pitch formatted version of the score and parts when uploading. (Same behaviour as when printing or exporting as PDF)
= discussion =
In my opinion this behaviour is not intuitive, and most people will be hit by printing/PDFexporting/uploading with the button enabled at least once before realising by trial and error that it should be turned off manually.
In my opinion "Concert Pitch" is a non-persistent display option (how something is displayed, regardless how it is captured/persisted in the source) and not a formatting option. I cannot think of any reason or usage case why one would want it enabled for a transposing instrument when saving/PDFexporting/uploading.
= the documentation fix =
To make it more clear that it should be disabled, I modified
https://musescore.org/en/handbook/concert-pitch
Before printing the score or exporting it to PDF, you should ensure that the Concert Pitch button is off, and that the individual parts are correctly transposed.
changed to
Before printing the score, exporting it to PDF or saving online, you should ensure that the Concert Pitch button is off, and that the individual parts are correctly transposed.
In addition, on
https://musescore.org/en/handbook-basics/share-scores-online#direct
Below paragraph
You can directly save a score online from ...
I added
Before saving a score oniine, you should ensure that the Concert Pitch button is off, and that the individual parts are correctly transposed.
= the feature request / code fix =
I can think of the following ways to make the behaviour more intuitive, in my order of preference, when any of printing/PDFexporting/uploading are initiated (I am sure more are possible or combinations of the below):
1) Just Ignore "Concert Pitch" and always print etc as transposed pitch (same as what happens when exporting as MXL)
2) Give a warning when any of these actions are initiated, encourage user to disable Concert Pitch. If there is a usage case to having concert pitch enabled, give an "Ignore" tickbox and allow the user to proceed.
3) Explicitly disable "Concert Pitch" when any of these actions are initiated, e.g a dialog box that pops up, noting that it will be disabled, before proceeding with the action. No chance to cancel / override (there will be a print / PDFexport / save online dialog after this that can cancel )
4) Silently disable "Concert Pitch" when any of these actions are initiated (e.g. with an argument of "if you don't remember to disable this before the action, we will just automatically disable it for you, and you are welcome to re-enable it after the action")
(2) and (3) are the most transparent / clear with the behaviour, but would probably require the most amount of coding.
According to https://musescore.org/en/node/15373 other programs ignore the "Concert Pitch" setting when exporting. Based on the discussion on that thread code was committed to ignore "Concert Pitch". I think a case can be made for it to be ignored for other similar actions, e.g. printing/PDFexporting/uploading.
Comments
I would never expect to have a score in any display but concert pitch online or in print. Having said that, there are some who want everything in concert pitch to make it easier on them somehow. These are the less educated in music and the less educated in music is the majority of users of MuseScore. Automatically changing from concert pitch to to transposed would lead to innumerable complaints of "My score is broken..." on these forums. This is a control that the user has over the program and the program should not second guess the user any more than it should second guess that a user wants to enter a 1/8 note B when the user presses N 4 B.
Lots of people use concert scores, some prefer concert parts as well. it is important that MuseScore remains a WYSIWYG program, not a "what I think is better for you than what you actually asked for is what you get" program :-). That said, sure, an "are you sure" dialog is not a terrible idea, as long as it never comes back once you tell it you really do mean what you say.
Thank you both for the different perspectives. I guess why I was convinced this was an oversight, was the text from https://musescore.org/en/handbook/concert-pitch
Before printing the score or exporting it to PDF, you should ensure that the Concert Pitch button is off, and that the individual parts are correctly transposed.
E.g. it makes it sound like concert pitch off is the standard (which it clearly is not), but since the program cannot do it for the user, the documentation advises the user to turn it off. Based on the discussion, recommending the above may not make sense. Rather one would just want to make the user aware that the setting on/off affects prints / exports / save online.
In reply to Thank you both for the… by Riaan van Niekerk
Concert pitch off is the standard for published scores, but as I said, many people do prefer concert pitch on for their own work, and some publishers do put out concert pitch editions. So it's important to support both. Some people may not know that concert pitch off is the standard and might unwittingly be posting non-standard scores, which is why I do like the idea of a warning you that you are about to post a concert pitch score and make sure you really intend to do so. but for those who really do prefer this, it is important to allow it.
In reply to Concert pitch off is the… by Marc Sabatella
Might I suggest something more like the continuous/page view drop down for concert/transposed display? I'm forever forgetting if button pushed it transposed or not, especially looking at others problem scores. Of course pushing the button makes is quickly obvious (most of the time) which one you are looking at if you pay attention to key signatures. I think this would help to clarify this issue.
Where we are
Concert Pitch enabled / disabled, which is a display property for the WYSIWYG editor. (to support my argument, the tool tip says "Display in Concert Pitch")
MuseScore automatically exports to MusicXML with concert pitch disabled.
Where we may want to go
We need a way to select/ set a preference for exporting/printing/saving online separate from the Concert Pitch setting. Currently it inherits the Concert Pitch setting. I don't think we should introduce another control on the home screen for something that will probably be set fairly infrequently, that I would be ok for a setting under Preferences -> Export, e.g.
Heading: Concert Pitch when printing, exporting to PDF or saving online
Default Concert Pitch printing the score, exporting it to PDF or saving online
Radio buttons
* Inherits from Concert Pitch setting (WYSIWYG mode) [default]
* Concert Pitch disabled (Instruments are transposed)
* Exports happen in Concert Pitch enabled (even when disabled in the "Concert Pitch" display property
(or even a config file setting to set this if we are not sure that coding the feature into the GUI has a wide enough usage case)
(We get the new user-friendly default behaviour, but giving experienced users the way to set a default, and not having to remember every time we save online / print / PDFexport)