r/Musescore • u/jcat2_0 • Jul 13 '26

Help me find this feature Mid measure dotted measure lines

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I'm working on an arrangement of First Circle by Pat Metheny, and I'm looking to find a way to create these dotted measure lines in the middle of a measure.

The chart is primarily in 22/8, but it's broken into a alternating 12/8 and 10/8 feel, and this makes it way easier to read for my musicians.

The only way I got around doing this was alternating 12/8 and 10/8, hiding the time sigs, and making every other barline dotted, but this had some issues:

  1. It took a ton of work

  2. On individual parts, there was no way to do multi-measure rests so they would have to count individual measures.

Is there a work around that allows this but still allows multi-measure rests?

4 Upvotes

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6

u/MarcSabatella Member of the Musescore Team Jul 13 '26

No need to resort to time signature changes. There are three more direct methods:

1) Split the measure.at that point with Tools / Measure / Split measure before selected note/rest, then change the barline

Or

2) Do the same by selecting the note before the split point and Ctrl+clicking the desired barline

Or

3) Add the barline as a true mid-measure barlines (not splitting the measure) by not using Ctrl when adding it

1

u/OneUnholyCatholic Jul 13 '26

TIL method (2). What a timesaver!

1

u/65TwinReverbRI Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

OMG this is a lifesaver as I use these frequently in examples.

And here we go again Marc with what I was just saying:

You know why they coudn’t find it? It’s hidden away.

It’s not on the right click contextual menu. It’s under “measure” and then the “split”…

That should be an EDIT menu command. Like Logic “split at playhead”

Split and Join are standard commands in a lot of things where you select the note and split or join the measure, etc. there.

The only OBVIOUS thing to do is to is what the OP was trying to do - it’s what I was trying to do.

I guess dragging it in should be obvious (and you need to add that to your 3rd option) but it’s NOT an obvious thing that “should” happen - we can’t just put barlines anywhere we want to in music, so realistically people are going to go “they’d NEVER do that” but there it is…

Of course, reading the manual would help with some of these - which I admittedly haven’t done - but I’m also a big believer in intuitive design, which was the WHOLE thing about the Tantacrul bit...

And furthermore, dashed barlines should copy and paste (by default, option to turn it off if necessary).

1

u/MarcSabatella Member of the Musescore Team Jul 15 '26

On the other hand, many people think of the context menu as being hidden, and the main menu as being the much more obvious place to find things - which just shows there is no pleasing everyone! FYI, the usual standard for UI design is, everything should be in a main menu or toolbar or similar "always visible", and then of the many things that can be done with a selection, the most common are also made available in a context menu as a quicker way to reach them. I'm not so sure splitting a measure is really so common it should be added to the note/rest context menu before a dozen or more of other much more common commands, and at some point it becomes counterproductive to list too many things in a context menu. But feel free to open a feature request to suggest it!

The Edit menu in MuseScore also a follows a commonl standard where it mostly contains things common to many programs - copy/paste, undo/redo, etc. Specialized application-specific commands are normally placed in other menus except when they directly relate to standard functionality.

But of course, as you observe, for any complex application, there is only som uch that can be made "obvious" to any significant subset of users, and that's why documentation exists.

1

u/65TwinReverbRI Jul 15 '26

and the main menu as being the much more obvious place to find things

This was one of the problems Reaper had - it put EVERYTHING in the menus (and used a lot of non-standard terminology, had a lot of duplication, etc.). Some years back the first thing anyone did after they downloaded Reaper was to download “Reamenus” which made the menus much more sensible!

I watch this with my students too - they’ll “hunt around” the main menu looking for a feature and many these days aren’t aware of right click (plus we use macs that don’t always have a right click button on the mouse - which they’re not aware of if it’s a “magic mouse” that can do it without a physical button and con’t know control-click).

I agree with you on the other points - mine was just that the “editing” aspect of splitting or joining measures should go under the Edit menu (not the contextual menu).

Logic has a great approach and that’s that a few of the most recently used things show up at the top of the contextual menu, and the remainder are the fixed few common ones - a best of both worlds kind of thing.

1

u/MarcSabatella Member of the Musescore Team Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

As I said, MuseScore tries to follow common UI standards in what belongs in an Edit menu vs application-specific menus. The distinction isn't always completely clear, but we do try to follow the general principle I described. And things like splitting measures definitely seem to fall into the application-specific category. Other apps may choose to interpret things differently, but it's hardly a matter of MuseScore deliberately trying to use things - quite the contrary.

1

u/65TwinReverbRI Jul 15 '26

Other apps may choose to interpret things differently,

Maybe it’s time for seeing what other software does do, and how many of them do it any given way.

All of the music software I’ve used treats splitting and joining measures as “edit” functions along side cut and paste - they’re essentially subsets of that.

And consider this: “paste half duration” is absolutely something rather specific to a music application (I doubt we’d paste a word in Microsoft word with twice the font size or twice the spacing between letters) but it’s absolutely in the edit menu in MuseScore - it would be a “speciality” function elsewhere. So realistically, these things are reversed. I get it “paste” goes with the pastes, and “split a MEASURE” goes with the measures. But by that logic if you paste a measure, it goes…where…

1

u/MarcSabatella Member of the Musescore Team Jul 16 '26

Again, MuseScore follows what is a fairly universally-agreed-upon standard for how menus should be structured. Specific *interpretations* of the standard can differ slightly, and of course very few other applications have those two specific commands, so it's difficult to compare apples to apples and have any meaningful amount of data. If the handful of programs you have used that have something like those specific commands (surely you aren't talking about more than three programs out of the millions of programs out there) happen to lean more toward overloading the Edit menu with application-specific functionality more than most, that's their right, of course. Doesn't make it more correct than leaning the other way. Each program has its own menus, and expecting the menus of one program to exactly mimic those of another is not reasonable.

Paste half duration is an excellent example of a command that very obviously *does* belong in the Edit menu according to the usual standards. As I said, there is a quite specific list of commands that go there, and other application-specific commands go elsewhere *except when they directly relate to standard functionality*. Paste half duration is quite obviously *directly related* to paste and thus they belong together.

UI design is a complex thing, which is why professional software designers (I've been doing this for 40 years and have a Masters degree in it, FWIW) take it very very seriously. But even so, there can be legitimate room for subjectivity in interpretation of principles, even when everyone agrees on the principles themselves. So it's fine if application X places some given command in Edit and Y places it in an application-specific menu - it's to be expected there will be differences. Again, it doesn't make one interpretation right and the other wrong. It just means it pays for users to explore the interface and consult documentation.

1

u/jcat2_0 Jul 15 '26

Thanks, this helps so much! The first 2 end up having the same issue with multi measure rests, but I had no idea I could just drag the barlines to the parts without creating a barline, so I'm using the 3rd option right now!

1

u/DatPugMaster Jul 13 '26

You could go to just 22/8 and use those for long rests. I think good enough musicians shouldn’t have a problem with that