number of bars per staff

• Jan 1, 2015 - 00:27

I have written out a simple piano arrangement of a carol, choosing A4 size, and the default staff space, on Musescore 2. Musescore will only put 4 bars per staff, when at least 6 would fit easily. Specifying 6 bars in Edit Style> System makes no difference, nor does reducing the staff space. If I apply less stretch to the first 2 bars of a line of music, they get narrower and narrower, but, instead of the first bar from the next line moving up, the last 2 bars of the first line just get wider and wider.I looked for the plugin 'break staff after X bars, but I couldn't find it. The nightly build I am using is R.4ba880a. Can anyone give me a solution for this? Thanks in advance.


Comments

There's not a lot we can say without seeing your score (the actual MSCZ file, not a picture of it), but my first guess is there is a line break at the end of each system you just need to delete. these show as little icons above the end barline. BTW, the "break every X bars" command has been promoted; it is no longer a plugin but part of the Edit / Tools menu.

Glad that helped. But FWIW, I don't recommend use of the option to fix the number of measures per line. You are usually better of using regular line breaks, whether placed manually (click a bar line then press Enter) or via the break every X bars command. The option are using can produce bar results in cases where there are some lines where it doesn't really fit.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

It helped a lot. In future, I will try adjusting the number of bars for each line individually, because, although the bars are very even in this carol arrangement, after I had adjusted the number of bars per line globally, the first line was too crowded, I suppose because of the Time signature, so I had to re-adjust it anyway, though I'm pleased with the result. I would really like to use the plugin, I tried, but I think I'm doing something wrong, because it didn't work with this score. I'll attach the score to this, so you can see it. Thanks a lot.

Attachment Size
We Three Kings.mscz 26.15 KB

In reply to by THC

When you say "plugin", I assume you mean the new builtin command Edt / Tools / Add/Remove Line Breaks? When you say "it didn't work", can you be more specific? What *exactly* were you trying to do, what did you expect to see happen, and what happened instead? it should normally be a matter of selecting the measures you want to apply the command to, going to the menu command, and then entering the desired number of measures into the dialog. When I try that with your score - selecting, for example, the whole score, then enter 6 in the dialog - it works just fine.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Ahh.... I was doing something wrong, I had opened the score, but didn't realize I had to select part, or all of it, to use the new tool. This time, I selected the whole score, then chose 7 measures per stave, and the score now has 7, perfectly spaced, measures per stave, without needing any further adjustments! A great tool, and a great help forum. Thanks a lot!

In reply to by THC

True, this tool "Add/Remove Line Breaks" is very useful. But a simple TimeSig change "broke" the layout: the break lines are removed, unfortunately.
And so on if you repeat the same operation: using tool to add break lines-> TimeSig change -> again layout is lost, etc.
This aspect can it be improved one day or other?

In reply to by cadiz1

Well, after a time signature change, the barlines are no longer in the same place, so it's not at all clear where the breaks should move. I suspect if we tried to guess, it would take the user liner to correct the bad bad guesses than to simply add new breaks. Realistically, changing time sig is not something one would would normally do street adding line breaks anyhow.

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