We're talking about simply swapping the order of notes or rests in a measure, which doesn't change the number of beats or otherwise invalidate it.
Keep downvoting, apologists.
That’s boring.
What alternative open-source, well-maintained, GUI-based engraving software would you recommend?
It's not like the feature is being requested in an mp3 player, it's a music score editor that refuses to allow editing a music score.
Even if there is no other better, so what?
It doesn't make it valueless garbage either necessarily, and so I agree with the downvotes on the original comment. But this point by itself seems perfectly valid to me. "Well-maintained" definitely takes a ding to it's polish at the very least.
I cannot imagine using a program like MuseScore for anything other than composing original music, whose content is not known at the outset.
Pretty much everyone who defends the MuseScore UI turns out to be more of a music typist. (And, sure, that is an entirely legitimate, necessary activity in professional music.)
"Oh, give it a few weeks of learning, and you too will be transcribing existing music (for your whole orchestra even!) in a clean left-to-right pass whereby you don't have to go back and do anything more complicated than adjusting a wrong note pitch."
There must be some reason you are unimpeded, such as having excellent grasp of music notation? Like if you hear a syncopated rhythm in your head, or tap it out, do you know the exact rest values you need to insert to achieve it?
If I'm doing it, I need to be able to take a stab at it, play it back, and easily adjust it as needed, like add another sixteenth rest here, and delete one there.
Yeah, if I can hear it in my head, I can write it out, at least for the genres of music I’m likely to write. I used to do it on paper, so the playback function is nice to have but I don’t need it to know I have the notation right. I’ll fairly frequently make a typo in note entry mode, like forgetting to switch from quarter notes to eighths or whatever, and have to go back and change a note duration, but I don’t get in situations where I would need to insert a sixteenth and make the rest of the measure reflow or whatever. Not sure if that’s what you’re describing.
(The use case I need this for us when I want to transcribe music by ear. I first use my MIDI device to type all the notes, and subsequently modify the lengths. Currently I have to cut, modify length, paste, repeat. For every, single, note, rest… Extremely annoying)
If anyone knows software that can help me with this, or another way to transcribe music wrt my use case, let me know!
Because, as reikonomusha put it in the previous comment, "you can edit, insert, splice, overwrite, etc. to your heart's content in your favorite text editor", which makes the overwhelming difference. You don't see the notation as you're entering it, but you have a way to iterate on that.
However, it greatly helps if you're a developer or computer scientist, since you're working with a compiled markup language.
LilyPond isn't the answer for regular mortals.
LilyPond has sane playback. If the piece you've written is 3 bars long so far, and you play the MIDI file that pops out of the compile, you hear 3 bars and then it terminates.
MuseScore requires you to specify the number of bars before you compose and then gives you sheet full of that many empty bars. When you click play, it plays through all the notes you have composed so far ... and then doesn't stop! It goes through the empty bars. It's like the Forrest Gump of music programs. Run, MuseScore, run! If you put a double bar in its path, it doesn't get fooled: that's not the actual end of the file, so it blows right through it.
Here is a question: suppose you decide that you need an anacrusis (or "pickup measure") but didn't specify one at document creation time. Where can you do that? It's not discoverable at all. There is a submenu under Add for measures, in which you can insert measures at the beginning or end, but full measures only with all the beats.
What is a problem for me though is that the measure properties dialog opens up behind the main window...
You're talking about a right click context menu which has a Measure Properties command. That indeed opens behind the main window. (Is this using GTK+? I regularly see this issue in GTK+ programs on Windows like GIMP; it's been there for at least 15 years.)
I see that I can set the actual time of a measure to, say 1/4 which creates a one beat pickup measure if it's the first measure.
One is in Qt (as manifested by this MuseScore behavior with the dialog).
The other is a long-standing thing in GTK+, visible for instance in the Windows version of GIMP.
Then there is this funny issue I fixed in something called the Cygnal project (a fork of the Cygwin DLL):
https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/cygnal/commit/?id=5d50aea73aace...
When a program that has never serviced its Windows message pump runs another program via CreateProcess, and that program creates a window, that program's window fails to come to the foreground.
This goes away with a dummy call to TranslateMessage.
I have a vague feeling this could all be related.
The weird thing is that the software can do this but they've made it so difficult and fiddly via the UI that it's impractical as part of any work-flow but there is nothing fundamental/technical preventing MuseScore from supporting this way of working.
The forums are generally hostile when (new) users innocently ask how to use the software this way - perhaps out of fatigue.
It seems it's been decided that the "one true way" to transcribe music is know how each note relates to the bar structure of music first before adding anything to your score. As a result it feels like trying to use a word processor stuck in overwrite mode.
And how is this "hyperbolic?" A quick search will show you that this is a question that is asked numerous times about MuseScore. Examples:
https://musescore.org/en/node/321194 https://musescore.org/en/node/333696
Second, I'd point out that Sibelius also doesn't allow dragging notes around, and now that I think of it, I haven't seen any GUI notation software that does. Either the developers of all of these apps made the same oversight and haven't realized how obviously critical and non-problematic this feature is, or, maybe the people who responded to you on MuseScore forums explaining that it actually would be a problematic feature are right.
Reportedly, Finale lets you drag notes around. Can't speak for the others.
Regardless of how important anyone thinks this feature is, I could accept the limitation more easily if the application didn't pretend to let you do it and then refuse. To do so wastes the user's time, which should be stringently avoided.
I just installed version 4.1 and it seems a little better than I remember, so I will give it another look.
As a result, I end up having to do a great deal of musical arrangement work in guitar pro of all applications. Then I can export and import it into MuseScore for final touches.
As far as being harsh, OK maybe. But hey, I did change "shit" to "trash!"
"dragging is the most dangerous way to move anything. If you have notes in the wrong place, simply re-enter them in the correct place and delete anything left over."
When asked why it was "dangerous," there was no reply. These people rabidly defend a mode of operation that requires you to continually delete your work and re-do it.
Apologists lash out at anyone who insinuates that MuseScore's functionality falls short of miraculous. I mean... you can see it in a comment above.
* The feature is complex. Notes most likely have data and constraints attached to them (e.g., a crescendo might terminate on a note). What happens if you drag a tied note? What if you drag a note from one measure to another? Can you drag between voices? This is a huge feature if you want to make it actually work for practical scores.