Re: [Rosegarden-devel] Notation Issue 2 (Marks after split and tie)

[D. M. M. <mic...@ro...>]

On Sunday, January 16, 2011, Julie S wrote:
 
> * Provide way to break (or remove) the tie

It's called "collapse equal pitch notes" or the = key, I think.

> * Allow another a way to override the auto selection of all tied notes

A series of tied notes is effectively one entity, and we finally treat it that 
way (or really, fake it in a way that's transparent to the user), which is a 
very important breakthrough that closed several bug reports that had thwarted 
my finding a solution to them for many years.

I acknowledge that this needs some refinement somehow, because I had never 
considered the case of being unable to avoid applying marks to each note in 
the series.  However, allowing users to override this selection behavior and 
manipulate parts of the tied series individually is definitely not the right 
approach to take.

> Note 1: Adjust->Notes_Collapse Equal Pitched Notes removes the Tie, but
> then we have a measure with to many beats in it.

Remember that so far a the sequencer is concerned, a series of tied notes is a 
single entity.  That's why you can't just add and remove ties like any other 
random symbol printed on the page.  These are symbols that have fundamental 
meaning for the sequencer, and they require special handling.

It's awkward for notation purposes, but Rosegarden is a sequencer with really 
good notation capabilities, not a notation editor.  If you want to make tied 
notes behave in a fundamentally different way from the way they do now, you've 
got to take it down to the sequencer, and rethink a whole lot of things.  In 
particular, you've got to be extremely careful not to break the decade of 
legacy files out there behind us, which is baggage we're stuck dealing with 
one way or another no matter what else happens.

I decided that enforcing this reality at the GUI level, and leaving the 
sequencer alone, was the most reasonable approach to take after weighing all 
these considerations.  All the GUI does now is maintain consistency between 
how it manipulates what, and how the sequencer always saw what.  Before, there 
was a serious disconnect.

So then, what do users really need to be able to do with marks on tied notes?  
I can't see fingerings needing to change from one note to another, and so on 
like that.  My first thought is that it is most likely that you would want a 
mark to appear only on the first note in a tied series.  If that's acceptable, 
and even if it only covers, say, 80% of cases, then that would be easy to 
change at the level of this and any other relevant commands that manipulate 
selections of events.  Merely have them ignore any events with a TIED_BACKWARD 
property, assuming that they cannot be the first note in the series.

When I get time, I'll implement that, and we'll see how that feels.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre