Questions & Answers

Feature Request: Change "pickup measure" attribute for a group of measures to "regular measure"

+1 vote
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asked Dec 7, 2022 in Notion Feature Requests by charlesmay (150 points)

I want to be able to bulk select a group of measures and change the attribute for all of them from pickup to regular (and if I select an entire part with some regular and pickup measures, to convert the entire part to regular measures). Currently Notion only allows this to be done one measure at a time. This is labor intensive when an imported MusicXML file gets interpreted as having many "pickup measures" in the middle of the piece.

This problem happens because when Notion 6 imports MusicXML that contains "incomplete measures" it designates each of the incomplete measures as a "Pickup Measure". I had a MusicXML that came from importing an imperfect SmartScore scan that had produced MusicXML. Some half notes had been scanned as quarter notes which basically caused various measures to be considered incomplete. Notion considered those incomplete measures to be pickup bars. While this is a fair assumption for the first bar of a piece, it is NOT a safe assumption in the middle of the piece. But Notion numbered the bars as this. Note that not only are there repeated measure numbers at the start but also interspersed throughout (wherever a number is duplicated, that means all but the last duplication is considered a pickup bar): 0,0,0,0,0,0,1,2,2,3,4,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,14,14,14,15,16,16, ...

While the MusicXML itself was imperfect and was the root of the problem, it is Notion that should be able to fix this problem easily rather than laboriously having to go through the entire piece, selecting individual bars, and marking them as regular measures. The expected workflow would be to import the imperfect scan and expect to fix up the note durations individually but then fix up the measure numbering by group selecting sections of measures and changing them from pickup measures to regular measures.

Another way to avoid this problem would be for Notion NOT to make the incorrect assumption (or make it a setting that can be changed during import) that incomplete bars are considered pickup bars. That generally is true for a very first incomplete bar but is generally NOT true in the middle of a piece. Notion is incorrectly assuming that all incomplete bars are pickup bars. It should be able to correct this incorrect assumption with a bulk operation, not editing every single bar individually.

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