#1575 Inconsistent Collapse Equal pitch notes in matrix editor
While this was somewhat addressed in [bugs:#1495] , unfortunately this behaviour still seems problematic in the matrix editor with notes to be 'collapsed'
What I mean is, try this:
- In the Matrix editor
- create two notes that 'touch each other (e.q. 1/4 notes), one on the last quarter of a bar, one on the first one of the next
- Select both notes
- Do Adjust > Collapse equal pitch notes
As a result the notes (because they are in different bars), actually get tied which is fine in the notation editor but IMHO not fine in the matrix editor. Especially 'tied' notes in the matrix editor have two bad side effects:
1. if you try to increase or decreas the duration of the 'tied' note the notes are split and individually resized. This is conceptually and musically wrong in the matrix editor because tied notes are just a graphical convention, while in the matrix view we are looking at them as events.
2. The behaviour of the Collapse equal pitch notes is not consistent because if the notes are in the same bars collapsing will create a unique bigger note as expected; if they are across bars the Collapse equal pitch notes function will actually do what Phrase > Tie does (also a function in the matrix editor).
So I think there are 3. options:
1. In the matrix editor Collapse Equal-pitch notes does what it says which in matrix editor context means join the notes and make a new big note from them as long as they are adjacent and regardless of being in different bars or not. the typical use case is editing a string part in the matrix editor and wanting to join notes which span bars for voicing. In this case the former functionality is still retained with the 'Tie' command which more intuitively ties notes if they span bars
2. Create a new 'join equal pitch' functionality which taken selected equal pitch notes joins them into one note. An added possibility of this could be that it would work also for non-adjacent notes. But I'm not sure if this would really be useful (might be confusing)
3. Retain the current behaviour but allow the user to change the duration of 'tied' notes globally.
personally I'd prefer 1 or 2 (without the non adjacent notes behaviour)
That does sound reasonable. Right now, each note in notation has an underlying "Event" object. It would be nice to know the history of that decision. That might shed some light on what might happen if we change it.