musicxml, tablature and grace note problem

• Sep 25, 2014 - 15:18
Type
Functional
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
active
Project
MuseScore
Tags
musicxml
tablatures

Musescore 2.0 beta 1

I have attached a sample file. It has one measure with a single grace note and a 2 note chord with 2 grace notes. Load it, select any of the grace notes and hit the up or down arrows. Notice the fret number changes for the note (as it should).

Now save the file as musicxml and load the xml file. Try to do the same thing. For some reason the up and down arrows do not work the same way.

Also, if you muck with the xml and change the stem tag from 'down' to 'none' for the chord grace notes you will notice the stem goes away but the beam stays on top. There doesn't seem to be a beam='none' option in musicxml so when you set stem='none' you will have to change the beam options internally in the code (I think)

Also notice the way the 2 grace notes of the chord appear at different distances from the chord. Is there a way to have a chord's grace notes line up beside the chord?

Attachment Size
grace_chords.mscz 1.91 KB

Comments

• Sep 25, 2014 - 18:31

A little more information:

Using another tab editor (tabledit) you can create a chord and attach grace notes to each note in the chord if you want. In guitar music it would translate into doing a very quick slide barring several strings, which is very common.

I'm guessing from hacking at Musescore that you can only attach grace notes to the chord object and not the individual notes of the chord. This explains the indentation problem I mentioned above.

In musicxml, a two note chord with grace notes attached to each note would come in as: grace -- first note of chord -- grace -- second note of chord (marked as a chord). Musescore doesn't like this and creates 2 notes with grace notes attached, thus smashing the chord and throwing off the timing for the rest of the measure.

So, if I'm guessing correctly, there is nothing that can happen in Musescore 2.0 to support this because the fix would require a major internal change to how chords are handled. Perhaps this is related to the slur problem where the slurs are drawn from note to top of chord, which makes no sense in tab because that means you are sliding/hammering between strings.

However the beam and up arrow key problems are unrelated.

Hope this helps

Reply

• Sep 26, 2014 - 18:43

You are correct that in MuseScore, grace notes are attached to chords, not notes. You are also correct that it would be non-trivial to change this. Similarly for slurs, although would probably be not *as* major of a change.

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