whole measure rests move wildly
When I select a whole measure rest and attempt to move it, it jumps around wildly in the measure as I hold it with the mouse. If the measure is wide, the rest is finally positioned at the point where the mouse releases it. In narrow measures it can wind up positioned strangely in between the measures.
Comments
Those full measure rests are not designed to be moved; this should never be necessary. The full measure rests that display by default in empty measure are supposed to be centered according to standard music engraving practice. If you were attempting to create whole rest (that would normally be left aligned), simply enter the rest normally (delect whole note duration, press "0").
BTW, if you do have some unusal special case scenario that requires you to have these still be full measure rests rather than four-beat rests, use the Inspector or double click then arrow keys to move it rather than dragging. The bug with dragging is a known issue - see #43306: while dragging a full measure rest, it gets displayed to far to the left
In reply to Those full measure rests are by Marc Sabatella
Thank you, Marc. I was exploring vertical positioning of the whole rest for cues. The arrow keys work fine to do that. I did notice an anomaly in that when the whole measure rest moves into ledger line territory, the width of the measure suddenly widens.
In reply to Thank you, Marc. I was by John Ruggero
I assume you have noticed that the whole measure rest *automatically* moves if you have cues in another voice, but of cours,e there is no guarantee it moves exactly the right amount so sometimes a manual adjustment is indeed needed in those case, so click & arrow or Inspector is the way to go.
As for the iwdth of the measure, indeed, since a rest with a ledger line requires slightly more room than one without, this will cause the measure itself to require slightly more room as well. Shouldn't be noticeable in real life, though, since these measures won't be empty - they will contain cues in other voices.
In reply to I assume you have noticed by Marc Sabatella
Marc, I don't think that it is acceptable for the measure width to vary depending on the vertical position of the whole rest. I would consider this something to fix. And the ledger line on the whole rest is a wider than usual, which adds to the problem.
Please do not respond if it is simply my lack of experience that is causing the following issues. I will soon have it figured out. I include it only in that it might be helpful in understanding the problems that someone new to the program encounters when they are hands-on learners like me with not a lot of time at their disposal:
I still haven't learned how to do cue notes, but assume I can simply convert normal notes to small notes with the inspector. So I insert eight normal size 8th notes in voice 1 in a 4/4 measure. I have no idea how to cause a whole measure rest to appear in voice 2, so I insert a whole rest in voice 2. The whole rest appears in the wrong place: at beginning of the measure, and it is impossible to move it to the middle. I look in the handbook under "measure rest". It only contains information about whole measure rests for a single voice. Nothing about multiple voices and I am at a loss as to where to look next because I can't find an index to the handbook.
So I insert eight normal size 8th notes in voice 1 in another 4/4 measure. I select them and convert them to voice 2 by depressing the 2 at the top left. The voice 1 notes appear to change to voice 2 but EIGHT 8th rests appear in voice 1 instead of a whole measure rest! Experimentation yields similar results for other combinations of notes and voices: the eighth rests never congeal in larger units. Now, I am really at a loss and am faced with trying to figure out where to look for the information in the handbook.
Anyway, I will keep experimenting as much as time permits. There must be much that I am missing.
In reply to Marc, I don't think that it by John Ruggero
It's not the the measure width varies according to vertical position - it's that it varies according to the actual content of the measure. More content = wider measure, that's standard engraving practice. A ledger line might not be *much* wider than a plain measure rest, so it only affects the measure width a little, but I don't recall any of the standard engraving guides we usually refer to (eg, Elaine Gould's "Behnd Bars") talking about a special exemption for this case. Do you have an authoritative reference that suggests otherwise?
And again, in practice it would not normally be an issue, because you would never normally have a measure with nothing but a full measure rest in it but still also need to put that rest on a ledger line.
As for cue notes, these are indeed very easy to create using the Inspector - select the notes (select range, hit Notes button to limit selection to just notes), turn on Small under Chord and turn off Play under Note.
To cause a full measure rest to appear in voice 2, see #25763: Cannot enter whole measure rest as such and #95461: Allow to enter full measure rests in note entry mode. Currently, best way is to enter the cue in voice 2 leaving the full measure rest in voice 1, then switch voices afterwards if desired. But as shown in those issue reports, we recently implemented a more direct way to enter a voice 2 full measure rest for the next release.
In reply to It's not the the measure by Marc Sabatella
In Finale, the vertical movement of a whole rest on and off the staff has NO effect on the measure width. Finale accomplishes this by having small ledger line "wings" present on ALL whole measure rests. They are just covered by the staff line when the rest is on the staff.
The "wings" on the MuseScore off-the staff whole rest are wider than usual and this compounds the problem. The widening of the measure is in proportion to the starting measure width and will cause major spacing problems. Try it with a measure that takes up 1/4 of a line. The change is GIGANTIC as the rest moves on and off the staff.
Thank you for confirming the correct way of doing cues notes, Marc. And the full measure rest system that you describe works well too. But I am glad that a more direct way is in the works.
In reply to In Finale, the vertical by John Ruggero
I am not sure what you mean about the change being gigantic. Perhaps something unusual is going on with the score you are using or something is wrong with about how you are doing it. Please post the specific score you are having problems with and precise steps to reproduce the problem. But on my system, if I raise the full measure rest to introduce a ledger line in an otherwise completely empty measure, it adds only a fraction of a millimeter to the width of the measure, even if the measure is for reason unusually wide (very rare for an otherwise empty measure).
See for instance this screenshot:
As you can see, the measure was widened only by a very slight amount. It's difficult for me to imagine a case where this would matter at all, but even if you have some such rare case, you can simply reduce stretch for the measures in question (Layout / Decrease Stretch, or press "{").
In reply to I am not sure what you mean by Marc Sabatella
Interesting. Here are my screen shots, Marc. Quite a difference.
In reply to Interesting. Here are my by John Ruggero
It looks to me like that that specific measure is exhibiting this behavior so far out of proportion because it's had its stretch increased to an extreme degree.
In reply to Interesting. Here are my by John Ruggero
In order to understand what is going on, we'd need to see the score itself, not just a picture of it. Indeed, if for some reason you have put a crazy high stretch value on the measure, that could cause that effect. There would not normally ever be a real world reaosn to do that though. Whatever it is you might have been trying to do by pushing the stretch well past normal bounds is probably better accomplished through other means. Which is another reaosn why seeing the actual real world score where this came up would be useful.
In reply to In order to understand what by Marc Sabatella
Dear Marc and Zack,
I didn't realize that stretching of the measures beyond a certain point would have bad effects. Chalk up another one to my inexperience with the program. I tried moving the whole measure rest in a measure that was even bigger than the one I just posted, because it was filled with 32nd notes so that no stretching took place, and indeed the change is small.
However, I still feel that any change in measure width caused by the vertical movement of an item is unacceptable and should be fixed. The Finale solution that I described seems easiest to implement. Put smaller "wings" the same thickness as the staff lines on ALL whole rests and there will be no shift.
I am hoping that my naive comments might be at least a little helpful in developing the program, somewhat as a program tester might be who comes upon things that an experienced user might never encounter or think about. I am doing this because I think that this program has so much promise and would like to help in some way.
So here is another one:
I was trying to learn how to put a certain number of measures on a line and finally found it under Breaks and Spacers in the documentation. It mentions the "Breaks Palette", so I immediately started looking for that palette under View since a Breaks Palette was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing under View, which caused immediate annoyance and confusion. Suddenly it dawned on me that the "Breaks Palette" is not what is usually called a palette at all (since it cannot be removed and stand on its own) but is simply one item on the Palettes pallet called "Breaks & Spacers."
I would have had a much better experience if in the "Palettes" palette were called the "Simple Palette" or whatever, and the documentation had read Simple Palette>Breaks & Spacers. Compounding the confusion for me is the fact that the smaller palette is called "Palettes", a plural noun, and the larger one, the "Master Palette", a singular noun.
This is the second time that I have encountered terminology that varies from the norm in MuseScore. The first was MuseScore's calling a "note head" a "note" and anything with a stem a "chord" in the Inspector. I don't think that using terminology that could be confusing to a musician is helpful. Call a "note head" a "note head" and "stemmed notes", stemmed notes". And call a "palette", a "palette", not "palettes", and an item on a palette, an "item on a palette", not a "palette."
In reply to Dear Marc and Zack, I didn't by John Ruggero
Again, it's not vertical motion that causes the change in width, it's the *new content* that causes that the change in width. The rest with ledger line is wider than the rest without, plain and simple. Yes, special casing could be added to handle that specific situation, but the basic fact won't change - add more content to a measure, it gets wider. That's true in Finale and Sibelius and virtually all traditionally engraved piano music, even if in certain specific cases there might be special exceptions made here or there at the discretion of the editor. Feel free to file an official feature request to the issue tracker for this special handling of this particular case if you like.
As for adding wings to the rests, that's not really a workable solution, because in MuseScore, staff line thickness is customziable, so the wings wouldn't necessarily match up with the staff lines. MuseScore uses the standard SMuFL layout for music fonts, and it defines the whole rest without wings as a seaprate glyph from the whole rest with, and we need to support multipe fonts that obey this standard. So we really would need a different way of doing this. Not impossible, but given that again in real life the difference is negligible (normally one would not be using extreme stretch values), I think this is likely to not be very high priority.
As for note versus chord, this distinction comes from Sibelius, so it's already familiar to half the music notating world - just not the half that is more accusotmed to the Finale way of doing things :-)
Not really sure of your point regsarding palettes. I use lots of programs that combine multiple subpalettes onto a single main palette; it's not an unusual layout in my experience. But if you feel like starting a new thread proposing a specific change in wording, feel free!
In reply to Again, it's not vertical by Marc Sabatella
BTW, lest you think we don't take layout seriously, please see https://musescore.org/en/node/25102 to get an idea of the very many improvements we've made in layout over the past few years. The piece showed as an example in that thread renders much better in MuseScore than in Finale - the treatment of collisions between voices, the stacking of accidentals, the positioning of dots, etc. These are all areas where we made it a priority to improve the layout over previous versions because we knew these changes would affect a large number of users.
And this work is still on-going. Werner Schweer (lead developer) is experimenting with furth layout optimizations that would allow some overlap of elements between voices or staves that currently is not allowed by any of the major notation programs. It's entirely possible this work will happen to address the case of a full measure rest with ledger lines with no additional special casing. But whether it does or not, it will definitely have a large positive impact on many real world scores.
In reply to Again, it's not vertical by Marc Sabatella
Marc, I know you were joking, but I don't consider using the terms "note" and "chord" correctly as the "Finale way of doing things", because they are not terms defined by Finale but by the English dictionary. If Sibelius does the same, it is equally at fault in misusing terms known to every musician.
And the term "Note" is not used consistently in MuseScore: I bring up the Inspector and see the general terms "Notes" and "Rests." But then when the Inspector opens, I see word "Notes" again but now with a new meaning: note heads. The word is first used to mean what the world means by it, but then it takes on new meaning known only to some. This is quite confusing and needlessly so. I would suggest that MuseScore not follow the lead of Sibelius, but of logic and consistency.
If the "Palettes" palette consists of a number of sub-palettes, what does the Master Palette consist of? If it also consists of sub-palettes, I don't understand why it is not also in the plural and called "Master Palettes". I would suggest that the very term Master Palette indicates that even MuseScore sometimes considers a "palette" to be something collective (and possibly movable) as opposed to the items that it contains. But then sometimes not...
In reply to Marc, I know you were joking, by John Ruggero
There is value in using terminology consist with other software. The use of "Note" and "Chord" used in Sibelius and MuseScore actusally *is* pretty consistent with standard musical usage. Your characterization of how MuseScore uses these terms is a bit off, which might be why it doesn't seem as familiar or consistent as it really should. "Note" doesn't *just* refer to the note head; it refers to all aspects of a single note within a chord. And "Chord" doesn't require a stem; it applies just as much to whole notes. It means all notes occuring at that time in that voice. This is pretty standard usage in the music engraving world. And within the Inspector, the "Notes" button *does* mean the same thing in this context as the "Notes" field. Feel free to start a new thread if you have more specific questions about this usage.
In reply to There is value in using by Marc Sabatella
Thanks, Marc. I would start another thread, but I don't think that it would be of great value until I am more familiar with the program. Thanks for your patience.
"Chord: Three or more pitches sounded simultaneously or functioning as if sounding simultaneously." (Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th edition)
"Voice: (3) a single melodic line or part in polyphonic music, as in a four-voice fugue. (Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th edition)
In reply to Thanks, Marc. I would start by John Ruggero
FWIW, the definition of "voice" used above is the same as in MuseScore.
The word "chord" is indeed different - the definition you give is more colloquial and applies to music *theory* more than the particular field of music *engraving*, which is more specialized. The problem is, there *is* no colloquial term for what the engraving sense of the term. So no single word or even short phrase would convey the concept well to those who are not music engraving geeks. Meaning, we have to go with the most common term actually used in this world - which is clearly the word "chord" - and hope that those not familiar with this usage will read the documentation or otherwise eventually come to understand it.
In reply to FWIW, the definition of by Marc Sabatella
I will investigate the interesting improvement to spacing in MuseScore that you mentioned, as well as make specific suggestions regarding nomenclature in MuseScore in another thread; but not before I really know what I am talking about.
However, as a principle, it would seem best to me to use pre-existing musical terms correctly. You say that some musicians define a chord one way, but engravers another way. It is frightening that such terms are beginning to have different meanings depending on what branch of music you are in. If true, musical terms are in danger of becoming a confused mess. Is a "song" an orchestral work, a short piano piece, or a piece sung by the human voice? Why, it is now all of those things! But is that small note a "note" or is it a "chord"? Why, it is note that we call a chord!
For me the term "layer" is ideal for what it describes, because it was not a common musical term before it began to be used in notation software. A layer can be any number of tones played simultaneously; while a "voice" is a single line melody. And yes, Finale also misuses the term "voice".
In reply to I will investigate the by John Ruggero
I think you are getting overly hung up on a very small detail. We're not talking about two radically different definitions o the word "chord"; we are just talking about expanding the colloquial definition very slightly to allow for chords of two or one note. This is convenient for the same reason that many other notations need to make the exact same distinction - so that we can differentiate attributes that apply to all notes of a chord from those that apply to individual notes only. If there were a better term for this distinction, we'd be happy to consider it, but so far, I've never heard one proposed.
So there is really nothing frightening about it - just a very small new concept for some users to learn and then move on.
In reply to I think you are getting by Marc Sabatella
Sorry to beat this thing into the ground, Marc, but I consider clarity of language to be very important. To me, a "chord of one note" is like the sound of one hand clapping.
I do notice that I am not the only one with qualms about the terminology:
https://musescore.org/en/node/25503
Once I understand what is going on and why, I will suggest something. Until then, I will hold my peace.
I do continue to be impressed by the MuseScore community and its commitment to excellence.