I’m writing a piece with open meter utilising very free rhythms and bars of different lengths.
Say I decide that I want to insert a small segment into the middle of a certain bar.
What happens currently is that the music to the right of the insert cursor moves (as it should) but the barlines retain their previous rhythmic positions and don’t move ‘with’ the music. To fix this all the barlines after the inserted material have to be erased and new ones inserted one by one in the correct places.
In metered music the current behaviour might make more sense, but for open music with bars having no metrical meaning this is quite a nightmare…
Would you consider adding an option for moving the barlines with the music?
This could actually be useful for metered music as well, if for example you’d want to add an extra beat to a bar and not have all the following music offset in relation to the barlines…
We certainly will add an option to insert time into the current bar when using Insert mode. I’m afraid it will take a little time for us to get there, but it is absolutely in our plans.
Chiming in on this one. Open meter is great when first using it and there is no bar line except the end of flow bar line.
But once you place another bar after the open meter bar, then it is very difficult to edit notes without spilling into or receiving unwanted notes from the next bar.
So here’s an idea how to solve this. I’m sure there are others but this seems really intuitive to me.
Give the ending bar line of every bar a locked property which locks the duration of the bar. The current bar only owns lock of the end bar line. The previous bar owns the lock of leading bar line. Bars that are open meter default to unlocked. Bars that aren’t open meter default to locked. When in insert mode, editing in a unlocked bar will expand or compress the duration of the bar as notes are added or removed. Editing in a locked bar in insert mode will slip notes into or from the next bar. Note that the lock only take effect in insert mode.
Visually it should be obvious when a bar line is locked when in insert mode. So a color or a bar line texture or some visual property would be useful.
Not sure when it would be useful to change the property but if it were made available then I’m sure someone would find a use for it. On the other hand, visual property of the lock would not be necessary if it weren’t changeable by the user.
So just an idea.
Thinking about this some more, I’ve come to the conclusion that open meter bars should just be unlocked and non-open meter bars should be locked. And the lock wouldn’t be editable by the user. It’s simple, intuitive and provides the expected behavior. I’m leaving the above in this post in case someone thinks there is a good reason to make the lock user editable.