forcing more bars into a line

• Sep 26, 2020 - 07:02

Forgive me if this is a topic already covered here somewhere, but I am new to MS and cannot figure out how to change the number of bars per line of music. There has to be a way of eliminating the dreaded widows and orphans, and there are times when I just want 5 bars on the first line rather than the 4 MS gave me. I can't get the first bar of the second line to be up on the first line. It is a bar of rest, so, it doesn't need to be super pretty. There will be other times I'd like to spread out a line and spread them out for page fitting, etc. Is there a way to do this?? This was one of the few things I could do in Finale and Sibelius and I want to abandon them forever. Thanks in advance.


Comments

I found the "add/remove system breaks" under format, and that is useful. But it seems to be global rather than allowing for customization of each line if you need it. I'm having trouble figuring out what the system breaks and section breaks actually do, as no matter where I put them, nothing happens. Thanks again.

In reply to by asotuba@gmail.com

I did manage to find a few relevant posts, which were very helpful indeed. I found that I can remove the system break icon by control clicking it, and could then delete it. This is pretty counter-intuitive, when so may other elements could just be selected and deleted with the delete key. I suppose there is some logic in it somewhere, like preventing one from ruining all the system breaks going forward. Also, the comment about selecting the bar or bar line and then return was incredibly helpful. With these tips that were previously posted (you have to search just right to find them, apparently), I think I'm now good with this issue. Thanks.

More to the point, though - MsueScore only gives you four per line in the default empty score that is provided for your initial experiments with MuseScore. When you are ready to make an actual score via File / New, there will be no line breaks already present. So you won't normally need to be deleting line breaks other than the ones you add yourself. On the other hand, you will likely be adding line breaks.

And to be clear: deleting a line break is as simple as selecting it and press Delete, just as you would expect. Adding is as simple as hitting Enter.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

For some reason, they weren't deleting for me when I wrote the first post. I must have double-clicked on the icon (Try that- if you DOUBLE click on it, it is selected, but the delete key does nothing. But if you then control click on it, you can get the submenus, including "delete". I don't know if this is a bug, or what- seems like if it were selected (turns blue) with either a single or double click, it should be deletable.)

In reply to by asotuba@gmail.com

A single click selects something while a double click will put it into edit mode. Depending on the item pressing delete in each situation will vary. Try it on staff text and see the difference. Pressing delete on a notehead in edit mode does nothing because it's undefined to have a note without a notehead in MuseScore.

In reply to by asotuba@gmail.com

Indeed, double-click is to enable "edit mode", which allows you to adjust positions manually using the cursor keys. This really shouldn't be relevant for breaks, but it does work - you can double-click the break, move it with the cursor keys, and the adjustments even survive save and reload. No really point to it so probably it should just be disabled, but I was surprised to see it actually does "work".

Will adjusting the stretch, via the Format pulldown, address this problem ? Do you know how many bars you want in a particular line before you see it on the screen or are you fiddling after you see what it looks like?

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