Empty beats/measures can't be selected or refilled in UI

• Mar 17, 2011 - 21:17
Type
Functional
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
closed
Project

You can have empty beats (or I don't know how to name it better, in german you would probably say "leere zählzeiten") which have _neither_ notes _nor_ rests. This seems to happen in the first voice only by accident / error, in the second voice you can easily produce this if you
1) enter three notes in the second voice: N, Ctrl+I, Ctrl+2, C, C, C
2) delete the note in the middle: CursorLeft, Delete
3) and delete the rest as well: Delete

This is a nice to have feature and correct behaviour I think, because you often only need a few notes in a voice and you don't want to have the rests around it.

But: If you want to fill the gap again, you are in trouble, because if you
4) select the first note by clicking with the mouse
5) enter some notes: D, D, D
the first note is overwritten as expected, but then the cursor jumps right to the next note after the gap and overwrites that to, so if you want to have your hidden beat back, your only choice is to select the note before it, increase it's duration (to a half note in our example) and than decrease it again to it's original value.
If the "gap" is in the beginning of your score though, your only chance is by deleting the whole bar.

I don't know whether to call this bug report or feature request, but I would like this to behave in a more convenient way.
Low priority therefore.


Comments

I prefer a more straight forward behavior rather than the one suggested by chen lung.

Expected behavior: If you add a note to a beat with a delete rest then the note should replace the deleted rest. Requiring any extra steps beyond this is confusing and does not offer any benefits to the user.

Discussion: Invisible rests behave as expected: you can replace them with visible notes without any extra steps. Deleted rests should behave the same way. Sibelius also works this way. (In Sibelius, select a rest and press Del to make it "invisible" and press Del again to delete the rest entirely. Notice that you can replace the deleted rests with notes using standard note entry.)

I just realised that replacing the deleted rests with notes using standard note entry works better in 2.0 nightly build (4112). I think I'm happy with this behaviour and we probably don't need what I proposed.

fnbecker, could you check the latest nightly build and see if you are also happy with the behaviour?

If so, we can close this :).

I just checked in the trunk 5471, and this is still present - no easy way to replace the deleted rest - not with a nte, not with another rest. The only way I could find to reclaim the space without completely clearing out the measure is to lengthen a note that comes earlier in the measure, but that's not an option if the deleted rest was on the first beat.

This doesn't strike me as minor, so I'm bumping the priority back to normal.

[ OK, in the thread where this came up, I now see lasconic has pointed out another workaround: exchange voices to put the "hole" in voice 1, then exchange back. See http://musescore.org/en/node/9918#comment-55589. Clever! But still, it's a bug. ]

Yes, I find this behaviour extremely irritating on he occasions when I mistakenly delete a rest from voice 2 and then cannot retrieve the situation, having performed other edits in the meantime, or decide I need to place a note in that position.

The behaviour should be as David Bolton suggests.

Title empty beats handling strange Empty beats/measures can't be selected or refilled in UI

Another way empty beats can be created is by importing a MIDI or Capella file (reported as bug #20659: Importing MIDI or Capella files can create corrupted or empty measures).

I'm assuming it's this same bug when complete measures are empty, as are often generated on import. In that case, the workarounds suggested don't work, since empty measures seem to be unselectable.

Status (old) active fixed

The final comment is not the same as this issue. In the case of MIDI and Capella that is down to the import process producing corrupt bars.

The original issue has now been addressed.

In MuseScore 2 commit 770b64b

I was able to write a 2 voice part with rests in the 2nd part
Delete some rests in voice 2
And then overwrite the empty spaces in voice 2 with notes.

So I guess this is fixed - set again as active if you disagree