musescore / musescore/MuseScore

Clicking "Voice 2/3/4" on a rest should do something

Open
#34,239 10 comments 1 reaction 2 assignees View on GitHub

@davidstephengrant is already working on this.

Since Jul 17, 2026.

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

Description

Your idea

Clicking "Voice 2" in this scenario does nothing.

Image

I think it should behave much like it would if a note was selected: assigning the existing rest to Voice 1, and creating a new one in Voice 2, then adding gap rests to the rest of the bar as required.

Image

In the case of a whole bar rest, it should replace the rest with specific duration rests in both voices as required.

Problem to be solved

It is quite fiddly to create notes in other voices, and seems to require a very specific workflow which is counterintuitive: first create a note in the wrong voice, then move it to the right voice.

This would enable some more flexible workflows.

(For instance, often a way I create a note of the right length is first convert a rest to that length, then press the letter key to turn it into a note. That doesn't really work here.)

Prior art

No response

Additional context

No response

Checklist
  • This request follows the guidelines for reporting issues
  • I have verified that this feature request has not been logged before, by searching the issue tracker for similar requests

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.

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.