musescore / musescore/MuseScore

Support playing chord symbols *only* while editing

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#34,371 5 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@avvvvve is already working on this.

Since Jul 28, 2026.

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Description

Your idea

Make it possible to have chord symbols play when clicked on, but not during playback.

Problem to be solved

There is "Play chord when editing" in Preferences > Note input.

There is "Play chord symbols" under the playback settings menu.

So you can have:

  • chords played during playback, and editing
  • chords played during playback, but not during editing

Whereas what I actually want is to play them only during editing, not during playback.

Why? Because I use the chord symbols as a kind of annotation for myself - they don't appear on the final score. It's useful to be able to click on them to hear that the chord does match the way I have voiced it, but I never want to hear it during playback.

It has occurred to me while writing this that there is a viable workaround: I can select all chord symbols and mark them all as "Do not play", while leaving these two settings enabled. But I suspect my use case is common enough that it would be useful to other people as well.

(Other workarounds I tried, like setting very quiet dynamics, or muting in the mixer control, did not work - that makes the sound also very quiet/muted during editing.)

Prior art

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Additional context

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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

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