Easy way to remove rogue notes and rests that appear in a project made from an imported .pdf

• Apr 19, 2023 - 07:45

I am a new MuseScore user since 2 days ago.
On importing a .pdf that presumably had some imperfection I found several bars had extra rests, or even notes with corresponding rests in the other staves in the bar, sometimes but not always greyed out, and in every case altering the beats in the bar, (e.g. to 5/4, 6/4, 9/8 in a default 4/4 score)

N.B. this method may also work in other cases of rogue notes, however:
For multiple staves, It only works when the rogue note/rest is in every stave
It doesn't seem to work when a group of notes/rests is selected, only for one at a time.

The intention is to isolate the rogue note/rest in a bar of its own by creating a bar line before and after it, the isolated bar can then be deleted.

  1. Go through the score in sequence from Bar 1 identifying rogue notes.
  2. Select the rogue note/rest
  3. Go to Tools>Bars>Split the bar before the selected note, click to split the bar. If the note is the FIRST beat in a bar you don't need to do this as the bar line before the note is already there.
  4. Now select the note immediately after the rogue note and create a split in the same way as in 3. If that note is the FIRST beat in the NEXT bar, again, you don't have to do this as the bar line is already there.
  5. Select the bar with the rogue note and delete it

It's very easy and in my case immeasurably quicker than re-writing the score manually from scratch.


Comments

In reply to by benawhile

The results from optical music recognition (OMR) depend on two factors:
a) the default quality of the OMR software (without special adjustment of parameters)
b) the visual quality of the source PDF score

If you get a lot of oddities (i.e. inaccuracies or corruptions), the simplest way is to insert a blank measure. Then simply transcribe the correct notes and delete the faulty measure. Otherwise you will just waste your time.

I have used OMR on hundreds of scores, often with almost 100% success but sometimes with complete failure. The quality criteria above matter a great deal!

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