Fingering issues and more

• Jul 22, 2023 - 22:21

Hey, I am having various fingering issues and since they are fairly common and were also happening in v.3, I finally decided to post them and look for solutions.

Using MuseScore 4.1.0 on Windows 10.

Issue #1: Please look at attached score1. Scroll down to the top of page 2. In measure 30, there is a finger number 5 that is way far from its note. What I do with finger numbers is I add them, and if a number collides with something, I use the arrow up key to adjust its vertical offset. For this particular finger number 5 I moved it only slightly up so that it was a pixel or two above the slur curve. It looked great until at some point, without knowing how and then, I saw this 5 floating in the sky. Ideas? Now, notice something else that hopefully will shed light into the problem: the vertical offset is -2.08. Change it to 0. The 5 moved next to the note, on the slur. Change the offset back to -2.08. The note returns far away. Change it to 0 again - the 5 now ends up over the note?! Change again to -2.08 - the 5 moves slightly above the slur which is what I had wanted and done initially. What is going on?

Issue #2: Thank you for fixing the bug where staccato dots were colliding with slurs! But the same happens with finger numbers so many times I have to move the finger number up to solve the collision (hence issue #1). Can't this be done automatically by MuseScore to save us a lot of manual work? E.g. move the slur up or why not if it is the start or end of the slur move the slur to start/end from/to the side of the note rather than above it? I've done it here and there manually in this sore. In addition to fingering, a note may have other stuff above/below it - an accent for example - which gets moved above the slur so somewhat farther from the note which I don't think is the best approach.

Issue #3: Please look at attached score2. This is a later version of the same score. Look at measure 3 (counting the incomplete measure at the beginning): On the first G-A-E chord in the LH, I clicked on the G and added finger number 3, then clicked on the A and added 2, clicked on the E and added 1. If you look closely, the 3 appears slightly misaligned so click on it, then click the right arrow key and the up arrow key once to align it better. Now look at the previous measure where there is finger number 4. Click the middle note of this chord and add finger number 2. Notice suddenly a lot of space is added below the bass clef and the finger number 3 jumps to the treble clef below?! Am I doing something wrong?

Issue #4: Is there a way to assign finger numbers to shortcut keys? Not add finger text but direct shortcut keys or adding 1,2,3,4 and 5?

I'd like to use this post to ask about few other issues I frequently have to deal with:

Issue #5: When adding crescendo and desrescendo hairpins, I select the desired notes and add the hairpin. If the selected notes are at the end of the measure, the hairpin extends to the end of the measure instead of just to the end of the last note as I see it in many scores and this is what I prefer. I don't want to drag the right handle of the hairpin every time (and it goes crazy a bit while dragging it). Example: the very start of attached score1.

Issue #6: Angle of beamed notes. In many scores I download I see the stems of e.g. 4 beamed 16th notes are the same length so the angle is close to 45 degrees. When I enter them in MuseScore, the stems have different heights and the beam angle is almost horizontal. This is probably subjective but the bigger angle makes more sense to me visually. As an example, take a look at the grace notes in m.6 and and the same ones in m.14. In m.14 I didn't touch the notes but in m.6 I have adusted the beam angles to look much closer to the score I was copying. The angles in m.6 look better in my opinion.

Issue/Question #7: At the end of the score (e.g. score1), I have added a vertical frame where I write personal notes related to the score. Is there a way to have such a frame where the text will wrap automatically and can be formatted (e.g. bold, center aligned, etc.). Not sure I am doing it in the best possible way currently.
P.S. Also if you copy the text of this vertical frame and paste it into another vertical frame, the new lines are lost???

Thanks.

Attachment Size
score1.mscz 46.55 KB
score2.mscz 47.13 KB

Comments

7) Nope to wrapping. Of course you can use formatting from properties for the whole thing or separately while editing like you have it.

8) Newlines are not lost so long as you copy/paste the entire text and not enter into "edit mode" and start copying/pasting in that fashion (at least in 3.6)

1) Alignment looks fine upon reset and pressing up (three times, for example). It looks like what you're describing about re-setting and dropping is a bug which should be filed in github (the fingering dropping down while changing the offset in the properties panel). But, to be sure, it seems like stuff like that would happen back in MS version 3 also and you just had to live with by resetting and doing some manual changes on the score. Not too big of a problem. It also happens when doing bulk selection of things when offsetting.

3) Looks fine without offsetting and no extra space occurs on my machine, personally.

5) Yeah, for the hairpins I prefer that too for piano scores especially (obviously you don't get louder after activating a note on a piano). I talked about that on the forums like 5 years ago but no one did any thing about it (desired to have a style setting)... Could do a feature request on github and "hope for the best", but you'd want to provide examples and be precise to increase the "odds" of the team to find it a priority, which they probably won't. Maybe a plugin could do that too, but I've never seen anyone attempt to code such a thing.

Fact of the matter is, if you want to be in alignment with more professionally published scores, there are still plenty of manual 'mechanical' things that have to be performed by the user... especially it seems for piano pieces. Good luck! Or happy hunting, ... or whatever.

In reply to by worldwideweary

Thank you, worldwideweary. #1 turned out to be an already reported bug back in March.

As for the other stuff, I can certainly live with and work around the annoyances. I was just wondering if maybe I was doing something not in the correct / best way. I always try to boost my productivity with MuseScore. :)

I don't feel like attracting any more attention. Ever since v4 came out beside all the disappointment (the crashes, the multiple instances, etc.) it's been clear that users' issues have not been the priority. I guess we'll just have to live with what we have and hope they'll be improving it over time.

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