Tuplet problems

• Mar 16, 2018 - 12:15

I've read the available docs on editing/deleting tuplets, but there's no documented solution to my simple problem.

I've got a score where someone unfortunately used a 4/4 time signature and quintuplets rather than simply using a 5/4 signature and normal notes. ALL the notes are bound into tuplets and musescore treats tuplets as if they were prisons for notes - no obvious way to free the prisoners without deleting them.

There's no documented way of converting this to a 5/4 time signature, i.e. freeing the notes from the tuplets.

Any hints?


Comments

You must delete the tuplets, change the time signature and reenter the notes. There is no way to change tuplets to "free" notes.

Unfortunately, fixing others peoples mistakes is often more difficult than scrapping what they did and starting over in any endeavor.

There is a way to keep the tuplets and make them play correctly though. Insert a 4/4 time signature on the measure and change the display to 5/4 (right click the time signature, select time signature properties and change the displayed time signature). You can then insert a tempo that is 4/5 of the tempo of the rest of the piece (multiply the tempo times 4 then divide it by 5). You can make the tempo mark invisible by selecting it and pressing V. If the tuplet numbers and brackets are visible, right click one and use select>all similar elements and change the display to none in the inspector. Remember to change the tempo back if the time signature changes.

In reply to by mike320

Thanks for the cosmetic help - If all I needed was a nice looking printout, I'd be finished!

Unfortunately, I want to process the score with music21, so I'm left with tuples that I'll have to filter out (or re-input the entire score). Seems like a bug, not a feature, of musescore that tuples as collections of notes can be created but can't be removed, given that the notes are the fundamental objects.

In reply to by FredericH

You can certainly remove tuplets as well as the notes themselves. But removing something is completely different from changing the duration or something or changing the beat position of something. It's the latter two you really want to do, one note at a time. You want to lengthen the note from 4/5 of a beat to a full beat, and move it from, say, beat 1.8 to beat 2. You can do this by a laborious process of copying and pasting a note at a time, but it's not going to be better than re-entering it from scratch.

You could try exporting to MIDI then doing some sort of transformation in a sequencer. Realistically, you're probably better off trying to write code to do the conversion yourself in music21, unless the piece is short abnd simple enough to just re-enter.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

You could try to extract the mscx file from the mscz archive (with 7-zip, for example). This is an xml file containing the information read by MuseScore. You can then modify the sigN of TimeSig to 5, and delete all Tuplet tags (i.e. everything inside <Tuplet> ... </Tuplet> : the full definition of the tuplets and the tags inside the chords/rests), which can be done with a regexp.
I never tried, but it "could" work. The problem would be if other tuplets were present in the score...
Edit: this works in Search and replace with regexp in NotePad++
<Tuplet(\s*?.*?)*?\Tuplet>

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