GSoC 2019: Improvements to Instrument Changes
Hi, I'm Josh, I'm a 3rd year computer science student studying at the University of St Andrews, and I'm going to be working on MuseScore this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code.
The main goal of this project is to streamline the process of adding instrument changes. Currently, most of the functionality does exist in MuseScore, but you have to do every step manually. By the end of the summer, I would like the process changing an instrument to simply be to add an instrument change object, and use the instrument change dialog to select the new instrument. More specifically, I would like to implement the following functionality:
- Show the instrument change dialog when the instrument change object is added.
- Automatically change the instrument change text to the new instrument.
- Add a text object to the last line of music before the instrument change, to instruct the player to change instrument. This should move automatically if music is added or deleted.
- Automatically add key and clef changes for those instruments that need them.
- Allow changing between single line and 5 line instruments, and automatically change the staff type to fit that.
This will bring MuseScore up to par with other notation software, and greatly improve the user experience in this area. Any and all feedback is very welcome.
Comments
Looks good! I would be very happy with these changes, but I would also suggest taking a look at #42301: Instrument Changes: add ability to change back to a previous instrument. This should be very achievable in its most basic form, and it means that some decisions are made for you in terms of how you present things to the user (e.g. selecting an instrument, editing its name, etc.).