How do I get my old scores to open in new style?

• Jul 17, 2021 - 03:32

I have been writing with Musescore for many years, and I have a lot of old scores from early versions of the program that look bad and hard to read. When I open them with newer versions, they still look the same. I have to copy the whole piece and make an entirely new score to get the updated look, which is a fair amount of work, since the program doesn't copy things like repeat bar lines. Is there any way to open an old score in the updated style?


Comments

In reply to by Accornion

Well, there would have to be some change, but it might be more subtle than you are expecting, depending on how old the scores actually are and also how many manual overrides were applied. In many cases, you would also need to reset manual adjustments (eg, Ctrl+A to select all, Ctrl+R to reset), and in some cases (especially scores created way back in MuseScore 1), also remove custom formatting applied to text, and that's more complication.

If you attach a sample score, we can walk you through the steps that would be required for it, and presumably your other scores are similar and would benefit from the same approach.

In reply to by Accornion

You don't have to manually reset everything one at a time, but MuseScore normally tries to preserve the original look of your score as much as possible, so indeed, you will need to be explicit about your reset to undo all that.

When I look at your score, I see a number of things you did that were not the default in MsueScore 1.2, so it's not clear if you really want to reset all of that. For instance, it seems you told MuseScore at one time not to show clefs on every system. That's not standard practice, so that's one of the things you'll have to decide if you want to reset or not. You also for some reason - perhaps to get it to all fit on one page - made the staff smaller than the default. So a full reset of everything to defaults will probably make it two pages - is that OK? There are other places where it seems you overrode the original settings, so you'll have to decide about those as well.

But anyhow, here are the basic steps I'd be looking for your score:

1) upon opening it, check each of those first three checkboxes in the import dialog, and then click "Apply new style".
2) Ctrl+A, Ctrl+R to reset any remaining manual adjustments (I don';t know that this particular has any that weren't already reset in step 1)
3) go to Format / Page Settings and hit "Reset All Page Settings to Default", then OK
4) go to Format / Style and hit "Reset All Styles to Default", then OK

Finally, because this is indeed such an old score - created before text style was a thing and thus all formatting was "baked in" to the text - you'll need to reset the title etc. Frankly, it might be easier just to delete those and re-enter them, but anyhow, here's how to reset the text in these extremely old scores:

1) right-click the title
2) in the Inspector, click Remove Custom Formatting
3) then click each of the reset buttons that shows as being enabled

You'll need to do that for title, composer, and lyricist separately. You'll also need to select the frame itself and click the reset buttons for it.

For things like staff text, you can right-click one, then Select / All Similar Elements, and then do the reset as above.

The whole process should take about a minute per score.

In reply to by Accornion

Sure not. 10 years ago the default was Emmentaler as the Musical font, now is is Leland. Looks different for sure. But resetting the style does not increase staves. For tnbhat go to Format > Page format and reset there too.
And also, as Marc mentioned, to a Ctrl+A, Ctrl-R, which resests all positions. And check all texts whether they contain custom formatting and if so reset them too. That indeed is a known issue with MuseScore 1 scores (which 10 years ago is what it must have been)

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