Incorrect vertical placement when changing number of staff lines

• Jun 22, 2024 - 20:20

When changing the number of staff lines mid-score (e.g. for band/orchestra percussion parts), Musescore removes lines starting from the bottom and leaves the top line. Very annoying visually and functionally, and notationally incorrect (I think it should preserve the middle line in 99% of cases). But it also wreaks havoc on the vertical placement of a lot of things on those staves. It seems to calculate positioning based on the ORIGINAL staff, instead of the new one, and so brackets, instrument names, dynamics, and the selection box are all off.

I've attached a score with some examples (non-exhaustive), starting from both a 5-line and a 1-line.

Yes, you can adjust the offset of the staff, which fixes most of this. But then you get lots of element collisions, which on a big score is lots of work; text, dynamics, and most annoyingly, ALL tied notes.

(Another funny behaviour I noticed was when you "add measures before selection" prior to a staff change, the element for the staff change moves but the actual change stays where it is, no matter where the element is. After you do that, the staff change is permanent on that measure, even if you delete the element.)

For now I guess I can adjust ties and stuff manually, but a de-bugging of the change staff type would be really nice, especially for the band/orchestra composers here.


Comments

In reply to by bobjp

Yes, that's closer and what I'll have to do until this is fixed. The big issue is that ties between notes and some text are not affected by changing the offset. I also just noticed tremolos are also malfunctioning. Dynamics and accents don't adapt when you reduce staff lines, but then DO move when I change the offset, resulting in them still being wrong relative to the staff.

If you look at the score, all those things are now placed very strangely, and I would have to go in manually and move every element. I'm working on a large score at the moment and that is going to be extremely tedious... :P

Attachment Size
Screenshot 2024-06-22 at 20.15.22.png 63.32 KB

I can confirm this still happens in version 4.4.3. Below a file that shows the bug with and without offset (the bug happens in both scenarios), but changing also the line distance from 1 to 2 (as for a 2-line staff it makes more sense). The image was exported from the .mscz file with Musescore Studio 4.4.3.

Attachment Size
test-staff-type-change.mscz 48.66 KB
test-staff-type-change.png 606.28 KB

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