Add "second time only" and similar playback options for repeats (not Voltas)

Open
#19,994 21 comments 48 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
38/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
audio-video-rtc, desktop

Research direction

Start by reviewing the existing repeat-playback behavior and the prior report linked in the issue. Compare the requested first-time, selected-pass, last-X, and cue behaviors with the Sibelius prior art; done means playback interprets an agreed subset correctly while preserving Volta behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

feature request
Your idea

Very common in big band music to have a solo that repeats for example 4 times, and where some parts will play backgrounds only on the last repeat of each soloist, or similar.

Common notations I've seen in the wild

"Play first time only" or "1st time only" over the first bar (finishing a phrase), followed by "Play" later in the repeat, which should always be played
"Tacet first time"
"Play 2nd and 4th time"
"Last X only"
"On cue" (Of course there is no conductor to cue the computer...)

Of course, writing these instructions as system text works fine for most purposes, because I don't generally use Musescore to make recordings. Still, it's a reassurance to hit "play" and hear the computer interpret your music the way you intended it to be played.

If special notation is added, I would suggest adding only the simplest cases since it's impossible to predict how people will want to notate this concept.

IIRC, Sibelius interprets some of these special cases correctly. And if it doesn't, there's a manual control for it in the Inspector's "Play on pass" checkboxes.

Workaround: I don't think so, since we don't have unrolling of repeats yet. It becomes very impractical.

Priority: Certainly lower than, say, unrolling of repeats.

Problem to be solved

Get audio playback that better represents how a musician would play the music, in certain common scenarios of repeats.

Prior art

Sibelius 6 had this in Properties, and Sibelius 7 has the control in the Inspector. Screenshot from Sib 7.

bild

Additional context

Previously reported in https://musescore.org/en/node/72791. Couldn't find a Github issue on it after looking at all open issues mentioning "repeat".

Dominant language
C++
Stars
15.1k
Forks
3.3k
Avg merge
2d 2h
Merged PRs (30d)
91

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from musescore/MuseScore

All issues in musescore/MuseScore

Similar issues

More C++ issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.