joining scores via album requires all scores to have the same number of parts and staves
As of 50a63f3, joining scores via album requires all scores to have the same number of parts and staves, otherwise the join fails completely
Before that commit every subsequent score had to have less or equal the amount of parts and staves than the 1st, and if it had more, the 'excess' parts/staves got ignored.
This seems to be quite a strong restriction.
Comments
It's a restriction when building a score in MuseScore from scratch too. A score has a the same number of staves all the way.
Yes, but if the 1st score has more or equal to all the following everything should be fine. Esp. in connection with 'hide empty staves'.
But what if the instruments don't match - would you expect some sort of intelligent algorithm for trying to match staves? For that matter, what if the staff types don't match - standard in one score, percussion in another?
I kind of think it best to set expectation clearly from the outset - the feature is meant only for joining scores of the same basic configuration.
currently it doesn't care at all whether instruments or staff types match or their order, just the number of parts and staves need to needs to match exactly.
So yes, having some automating instrument- and staff type matching would be nice, but would be a 2nd step.
If a user want to to join a 4-part, 4-staff SATB score with a 1-part, 2-staff piano score, why preventing it?
Even more (and this is my current use case): when joining a 2-part, 2-staff closed SATB score with a 1-part, one staff soprano/alto, why not?
My point was, what if original score was say SA + TB + piano. Next was just SA + piano. Should the album feature figure out you want to use staves 1 & 3 from the first score for the second, so the piano plays back as piano not as voice? Or should it issue an instrument change for you? And if next score is voice + electric guitar tab + drumset, there is no way for that to work. The electric guitar part will display in standard notation because that is the staff type of the second staff, and the drumset part will also display in standard notation. It just seems we cannot possibly support all the things someone might try to do if we encourage people to think they can join arbitary scores. So maybe it's better to set very simple and clear limits: only scores of exact same configuration. Because otherwise there is good chance results won't be what user expects.
Still, currently it isn't even doing that. It would happily join a SATB with a string quartet and a 4 staff brass combo, with transposing instruments, just because they have the same number of parts and staves.
With bad results, I assume? That sounds like something else we should probably just disallow. Not sure exactly what this entails - make sure scores match in # staves, in staff "group" (standard / tab / percussion), and in transpositions at a minimum probably.
Or maybe I'm wrong and some of this would work better than I am thinking. But from what I hearing, it sounds like not.
Well, it does (or rather would) work quite well for my use case, a songbook containing single staff treble clef and dual staff SATB scores with a cover page that has 0 measures of a dual staff SATB...
Interestingly the resulting PDF's size is one 1/3 the size of the PDF generated from the the individual PDFs (some 400) using PDFSAM, 3.3MB vs. 10MB, quite significant.
Relates to #292005: [EPIC] ALBUMS issues.