upgrade messed up my old work

• Aug 18, 2020 - 20:55

I am writing a music course and often refer to scores I have previously written. The problem I have is that after I did your last upgrade 3.5.0.28537 every single page (I have at least 50) is now formatted incorrectly. Extra pages are added as measures are now moved, all my markings and added text are not where they were.

I do not want to have to rewrite all these pages. Is there a way to revert back to the version I had before I did the last upgrade?


Comments

There should not have been any noticeable changes in 3.5 compared to any recent version. So, something else may be going on here. In order to investigate and assist, we would need you to attach the score, or at least a relevant excerpt.

Now, if you actually are comparing a score written in MuseScore 2 - from a couple of years ago or more - with any version of MuseScore 3, you can indeed expect to see differences, because there were some pretty enormous improvements to the defaults, meaning scores that previously had manual adjustments to work around the deficiencies in older versions will often look worse now. Again, if you attach a sample, we can help show you how to take advantage of the better defaults in MuseScore 3.

In reply to by Cameron Munn

I see what's happening. There was a pretty annoying bug in older versions where blank lines in text were way too short, and some people tried to compensate by adding multiple blank lines between paragraphs just to get it to not look terrible. This bug is fixed, but it means all those extra blank lines are now as big as blank lines should have been all along, so you may need to go in and undo those workarounds bey removing blank lines.

There are a few other things I see going on here that are "fragile" in the sense of being in danger of also not looking the same as other bugs are fixed or other improvements made. Most importantly, it looks like you have text text positioned below one system that is actually attached to the system below that. Plus you have text under the three measures of a system as one long text with spaces used to approximate as if you had attached to each measure individually rather than actually attaching to each measure. It's a very dangerous habit, in that all it will take is a slight change to the metrics of the font you are using and suddenly things don't line up right at all (and in fact, it doesn't line up the same on my system as it does on yours, because I either have a different font or a different version of the same font).

So realistically, you should have a two separate system text for each example, both flipped below the staff with "X" or positioned there by default using style settings. Also possible different style settings for the questions vs the answers, or relying on autoplace to space the lines rather than blank lines.

But none of this is probably going to seem like welcome news. It wouldn't take long to fix up each of these - probably no more than 10 minutes or so for each score of this size - but I can imagine you might have dozens or hundreds of them (edit: or, I see now, around 50). Not sure how to best advise you, but if it were me, I'd bite the bullet and do things correctly from here on out with new scores, and then maybe revisit older ones only as needed.

In reply to by Cameron Munn

Looks like the link was posted above. But. I do caution you, you're really asking for continued trouble by continuing to rely on known bugs and quirks of older versions. If you're essentially done with this project, that might be the best way to go for now. But if you have more than a little work left to do, it will almost certainly be better in the long run to stop relying on those old bugs & quirks, as it will just become that much harder to fix your existing scores the more of them you have.

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