Idea for feasible rapid MIDI input, chords first, rhythm adjustments after

• Aug 19, 2022 - 17:03

Hi! I really love MuseScore, and I had an idea for note entry that might not be too difficult to implement, given the current internal setup. I realize that internally, MuseScore stores notes by measure. And so entering a ton of notes in MIDI with the same rhythm, and trying to edit the rhythms after, is not very workable. But would it be difficult to have this behavior within a measure? I.e., if I edit the first note in a measure from a quarter to an eighth, it brings the subsequent notes forward an eighth; or if I changed the rhythm back, it would bump subsequent notes down an eighth.

If that is workable, could you possibly have a simulated "measureless" score mode, meant for rapid entry, which internally, is just a super-long measure (like 10,000/1)? I am aware of the Insert note entry mode, but this doesn't seem geared for the way I enter music.

As background, I play the piano, and sometimes it's difficult for me to remember exactly which notes I play if I have a song that I want to enter. And so what I've done in other software is just play all the chords in one hand one right after the other, into the score editor as identical rhythms, and then adjust the rhythms later. This seems to work well with my muscle memory of the song. If this were possible even in a sort of "entry window" or super-long measure in a separate entry score, that would work perfectly with the way I would use it.

Anyway, thanks for all your work on this project, and I really like the recent layout changes!


Comments

Sounds like you might like the Duration Editor plugin then - see the Download / Plugins menu at top of this page.

And yes, eventually, something like that built in, that would also work on an arbitrary "scratch pad" measure, is definitely something many people would like to see someday, so it's on the radar.

FWIW, meanwhile I heartily recommend manuscript paper and pencil for initial capture of your ideas. Much simpler for just jotting down some noteheads to represent pitches, using spacing to approximate rhythms, then figuring it out later.

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