Composing in free time
I wanted to write a piece in free time today but to my dismay there was no feature that, I could find that would allow me too. Perhaps there is something I'm missing but if not it would be great to have it in the next version of MuseScore.
Comments
What do you mean by free time?
You can create a measure with as many beats as you need, then hide the time signature. Or create several, and also hide the barlines. Also check out Measure Properties and the ability to have a different time signature for display than the actual time signature.
In reply to You can create a measure with by Marc Sabatella
Yes, you can hide the barlines and even the time signature, but that doesn't seem to hide the space those elements take. Doesn't this detract from the visuals of "free" music? Should not hiding elements also remove all evidence of them in the exported file?
I've changed the Mussorgsky Promenade demo to hide the double barlines and time signatures from the first line just to demonstrate. You can certainly see where the barlines and even the time sigs wereused to be.
In reply to No barlines by schepers
schepers, Most of the space you are seeing in your image is because you marked the time signatures as "invisible" instead of using the same time signature and changing the "Actual duration" when needed (as described in the handbook, measure operations , "Duration").
For normal bar lines (without time signature changes) you can reduce the margin to zero. Edit > General Style > Measure ("left margin" and "right margin").
In reply to schepers, Most of the space by David Bolton
Those are both great suggestions! I was actually thinking in terms of just making sure each measure have as many beats as you needed to fill up the system. Using "actual" as opposed to "nominal" duration helps because then there are no extra time signatures you have to hide, and no extra space taken up. I'd say if you do it that way, you probably won't even want to reduce the margin settings - but it's nice to know that's an option!
In reply to schepers, Most of the space by David Bolton
As a fairly novice MS user, one would expect that simply taking an object and making it invisible would remove all evidence of it from the output. Sure, you would still need to see these invisible elements on screen in order to restore them, but nothing else (margin adjustments) should be necessary to remove them from the final output. That may be naive but...
In reply to Hidden objects by schepers
Actually, I'd say that while *sometimes* that might be what you want, usually it isn't. Hiding a note, for example, would almost always be expected to leave the space occupied by the note intact. And one of the more common uses of making other elements invisible is to leave the space so you can replace one of the built-in barlines or time signatures or clefs or whatever with a custom one you've created as a graphic. So no, I don't think MuseScore should automatically assume hiding would close up the gap. Perhaps a second option, "Set non-existent" or something like that.
But really, I'd say the goal would be to minimize the number of things you have to hide in the first place. That's why setting appropriate measure lengths, and using actual rather than nominal duration for this, strikes me as the way to go. Then the only things you need to make invisible are the bar lines t the ends of systems, and in those cases, you'll probably *want* the space.