musescore / musescore/MuseScore
Arco marking ineffective on acoustic bass instrument
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Since Oct 1, 2025.
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Description
Issue type
General playback bug
Description with steps to reproduce
This is not a recent regression (goes back to 4.3 at least), but I only just noticed it while testing some other things around reported arco/pizz issues.
- Create score for "acoustic bass"
- Add notes
- Add "arco" from the Text palette at some point
- Play
Result: the "arco" is ignored
Interestingly, it works if you add Contrabass as the instrument (and set "pizz" at the beginning). In both cases, it is using MS Basic, but apparently different sounds are being used by "Choose automatically" (I think the "contrabass" sound was added to MS Basic just a few years back). But aside from the different presets, the main difference between acoustic bass and contrabass was whether it defaulted to pizz or arco. Now, it seems that acoustic bass doesn't just default to pizz - it forces it.
Supporting files, videos and screenshots
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b6eb50e6-3b5f-47d1-b377-6c35a3b0750e
What is the latest version of MuseScore Studio where this issue is present?
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm), Arch.: x86_64, MuseScore Studio version (64-bit): 4.6.0-252730944, revision: github-musescore-musescore-7829779
Regression
Yes, this used to work in MuseScore 3.x and now is broken
Operating system
Debian 12
Additional context
No response
Checklist
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- I have attempted to identify the root problem as concisely as possible, and have used minimal reproducible examples where possible
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Assessment
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