To easily start playback from a certain point in the score in MS4

• Dec 22, 2022 - 16:35

In MS3, it is easy to start playback of the whole score from where you want it. If you want to play from the start of a bar, select the whole bar and press play. If you want to start from a certain point in a bar, select a matching note or rest and press play.

In MS4, if you select a bar and press play, the playback is only of the instrument you selected. To play the whole score from the start of a bar, you either have to select some note or rest that starts at the beginning of the bar or select the whole bar and then click away. This really grinds my gears and interrupts my workflow, as an action that used to involve only one semi-accurate click has been replaced by either one very accurate click or two semi-accurate clicks.

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I quite rarely want to playback a single part, so it's not helpful for me that this action is easier now. The program has become less easy to use for me with this change.

I want to point out that the functionality is not entirely consistent either -- reasonably, I should get more or less the same result if I select a single note or a range of notes and press play. It is weird that if you ctrl-select several notes and press play, the full score playback starts, but if you shift-select several notes and press play, the single instrument playback starts.

So this is a suggestion to implement the MS3 functionality for selection and playback -- selecting any part of the score and pressing play always plays the whole score. If you know a workaround, I wouldn't mind hearing it. Thanks for reading.


Comments

Well, we are all used to different things. I often want to hear just one staff, or just the woodwinds. In MS4, this is easy to do without having to open the mixer (which takes up a lot of space). If I want playback for the whole score at a particular place, I select a note. This worked in MS3, also. The professional software I use also works this way. Not complicated. Depending on the complexity of my score, it is sometimes harder to select a bar instead of a note.

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