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[MU4 Issue] Time & key signatures and tempo markings cannot be copy pasted
Describe the bug When selecting a range of measures with the mouse, shift or Control+A, all time & key signatures are not selected, thus are not copied. The same happens with tempo markings, although they are selected with blue.
To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior: Select any range of measures and copy - paste them in any other place or window. The selected time & key signatures within the range are not copied.
Expected behavior There is no immediate indication that the time & key signatures are not copied, so when pasted, the information is lost
Additional context Even if I specifically select only the key or time signature and copy it with Ctrl+C or from the context menu, nothing happens when I paste them. The behaviour is slightly different on tempo markings, that are being selected with blue, but fail to copy-paste when selecting the whole measure, although, if I select only the marking and paste it on a note, it does copy.
Note this is not a bug, simply a long-requested feature not yet implemented. Along with copying repeats, tempo and other system text, etc. It’s not especially complicated to implement; it just requires a design for how one would control when these things get copied and when they don’t.
I would very much like this to be implemented, either as a system select a-la Sibelius(command/ctrl+click), or as some kind of extra option on the selection filter. I think this has huge ramifications for orchestration of pre-existing piano scores. Right now I am orchestrating a good many piano reductions for a kids musical I am working on, and it is very annoying to have to manually enter the correct time signatures and modulations for every piece when I copy the piano part in. Some automation of this task would save me a lot of time!
Came up again on MuseScore's Feature Request forum. See Inserting bars with different time signatures: https://musescore.org/en/node/354339
+1 for this to be implemented - it's been requested for 10+ years now, so it seems like it is very desirable.
Adding to this discussion (I didn't find this issue when I searched before creating the duplicate above).
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not copying-and-pasting tempo markings is inconvenient, but maybe understandable, as it's not too uncommon for a pasted section to have a different tempo
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not copying-and-pasting the key signature is often incorrect, but there are times when you do want to copy-and paste from one section to another in a modulated key and you don't want the key signature to come along
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not copying-and-pasting time signature changes invariably means that the pasted section ends up wrong
The main problem I’d run into if this was to be implemented is redundancy, i.e. time signature or key signature copied where there’s no change. Cause you see, as a classical music transcriber, I run into reappearances of A section material a lot, be it the first theme in a sonata recapitulation or the main theme of a rondo or the first phrase of a minuet. And if time signatures suddenly started copying when I did my copy and paste, I would run into the situation of no time signature change, but time signature still copied way more than the situation of actually needing to copy and paste a passage with a time signature change in it. And then I would need to delete the redundancy and my flow would be much more broken than it already is.
So, if this does get implemented, I hope there’s a way to both avoid redundancy and have actual changes pasted.
@DaddyLudwig You would definitely need a modified rule for time and key sigs.
A simple range selection should not automatically copy them. I know Sibelius 'solve' this by having two different kinds of range selection. You have to click on a range selection a second time, which makes it a 'copy everything' range selection. It works as a solution but I'd be pretty concerned most users wouldn't have a clue what it does.
Anyway, we'd need to solve it ourselves someway too.
In my view, the solution could be very simple:
- get rid of the concept of range selection (i.e. Shift+Click will still just select all individual elements in that range, but not have discrepancies in behaviour with other ways of making selections)
- This way, the user can make a range selection, then use Ctrl/Cmd+Click to include/exclude keysigs,timesigs,etc in the selection
- Always just copy/paste exactly those items that the user had selected
I've said that before, but then it turned out that getting rid of range selections was not to everyone the obvious solution (although I don't know why not). Anyway, if we really want to draw a blue rectangle around the selection if it was created in a certain way, that's fine by me, but at least it should be possible to include/exclude individual elements from a range selection. I think that would make it a lot more useful also in other situations.
FWIW, it is possible to use Ctrl/Cd+click to add or remove elements to/from a range selection, but in the process it is converted to a list selection.
The difficulty with allowing copy/paste of arbitrary lists of notes that don't necessarily represent a range is in dealing with the "holes" that can be created this way - copying a selection that consists of one note from one measure on one staff, another note from another measure on another staff, plus some other random element on another staff, etc. It's not unsolvable of course; just so far no one wanted to tackle it. The ability to copy lists of other elements - lyrics, chord symbols, etc. - is itself "relatively" new, and it's already kind of annoyingly full of special cases. It would be nice to have one coherent implementation for copy/paste.
Anyhow, getting rid of the range selection as a separate concept is an interesting idea, one I don't recall being seriously discussed in the past. There is of course an awful lot of code that relies on this currently, looping from selection start to end. But no particular reason we couldn't keep those markers.
In any case, to require use of Ctrl+click to include or exclude time signatures one by one is not ideal, since typically it would be all or none that you want copied. The better model in my mind is to have these and other "system" elements that are currently not copied (key signatures, barlines, tempo and rehearsal marks, etc.) listed in the "Selection filter". Possibly defaulting to off, in which case we'd need a "reset" button in addition to or instead of the current "all" button to restore the defaults, which would now be mixed.
Hmm. I keep forgetting our slightly unique term 'range selection'. I didn't actually mean drawing a rectangle around elements.
I intended to refer to the more typical multi-selection method - when a user clicks within a measure to select everything inside it. I think it's at that moment (once a selection has been made) that we should provide some UI to let users specify whether they want to include key sigs / time sigs or not.
The moment it involves extra shortcuts to specify different kinds of selection, it becomes awkward, hard to discover, etc.
Alternatively, the Sibelius system (which is discoverable - although takes a bit of getting used to) of just clicking on a selection again to make it a different kind of selection should also be considered.
Simple rule: a shortcut should be a 'shortcut' to an existing type of action - not the primary way of performing that action.
A point of consideration would be how the current selection filter is affected and/or fits into this functionality. It currently is the way to exclude certain element types from a range selection, without losing the range-ness of the selection.
Perhaps this is resolved with the incorporation of a "System" sub menu in the selection filter that is unaffected by the "All" checkbox? I am envisioning something that contains time signatures and any other requested system data that is not currently covered by copy paste, and each element in the submenu must be checked manually in order to avoid accidents. It might be wise to change "all" to something like "measure", or the previously suggested "default." Either way, I would deeply appreciate not having to manually enter time signatures for everything I copy and paste.
Maybe I'm out in deep water here but it seems to be difficult to find a viable solution to select the information to be C&P. Apparently, today it's more or less only the notes and not keysigs, timesigs, etc.
A simpler solution could be that the selection and copy process includes everything as wished by many in the community. Then in the "paste" step, you decide what's pasted. This can, for example, be compared to paste only the text or numbers in Word/Excel if you only need the notes. In Excel, you have then more possibilities what's actually pasted, with or without format, equations etc. Maybe it would be safest to keep paste notes only by "Ctrl V", the other options by right clicking on the mouse.
Here's my two cents: keep paste the same way so that it works how it seems devs want it too. However, add a paste that keeps this information if some want it. This idea comes from Google Sheets and "paste format". There's a regular paste and a special one. Make the special harder to find for those of us that want it while still keeping UX easy which I believe is the discussion being had here. Not sure how elegant you all think that is (or maybe I am just rephrasing what's already been said lol 😂)
Wouldn't having a shortcut similar to copy/paste like, Control + Shift + C/V, or even Control + Shift + Alt + C/V be an easy way to add it to the list of shortcuts... Or to add, copy pasting all items as an unassigned shortcut for people like us who need it to manually set it. I am working on a project that's estimated to have just under 200 pages once done, the sound is delayed and Musescore is laggy with that number of measures when I tested with a sample project, and I'd rather not have to deal with that. So I'd like to split up the project into smaller scores, then compile them into one big one at the end, but apparently not since this still hasn't been implemented. Also, isn't it a bit ridiculous that this has been a requested feature for this long, other notation softwares have it, and its not hard to implement?
Just needed this today. I did start looking at how to implement, I don't think it's that hard, and logically the way to implement it would be that time/key signatures are not selected by default when you select a range of measures, but via selection filter (or whatever, I know some don't like that!) you explicitly mark them as being included in the selection. Either that, or when copying a range, all the information IS copied to the clipboard, but there's two paste modes, one preserving time & key signatures, and one not.
However - in the meantime I'd be fine with having the ability to easily splice two scores together, which would allow doing what I need to do. I gather that was possible in MS3 using albums, which are...not happening in MS4, ever?
Here's my two cents: keep paste the same way so that it works how it seems devs want it too. However, add a paste that keeps this information if some want it. This idea comes from Google Sheets and "paste format". There's a regular paste and a special one. Make the special harder to find for those of us that want it while still keeping UX easy which I believe is the discussion being had here. Not sure how elegant you all think that is (or maybe I am just rephrasing what's already been said lol 😂)
Yeah having an explicit "paste with signatures" command might well make the most sense, though it's kinda the opposite of the way it works in rich text editors where the default is "paste with formatting" but you can also choose "paste without formatting".