I understand the timing is not optimal, with ver. 2.0 RC under the way, but
the pressure itself of this milestone pushed me to speculate about the real
usability of the linked staff feature.

Note: I refer specifically to the linked staves within a single score, NOT
to the linking between a 'master' score and its extracted parts, which is a
different topic.

The linked staves feature is, since its inception, an endless source of
troubles, its implementation forcibly grew from a simple mechanism to a
complex (and fragile) system rather difficult to understand, with branches
all over the code; nevertheless, it is still plagued by many bugs or
inconsistencies, I'm afraid it will never work "as expected" and, for sure,
it will be very hard to maintain in the future.

This is obvious when standard and tablature staves are linked. Ultimately,
this arises from a basic misunderstanding: that standard notation and tab
notation are two different codings for the same thing. This is not true:
they are different notations, noting different things, and cannot be
*transcoded* from one to the other; perhaps, they can be *translated* from
one to another but, if done mechanically by an algorithm, the result will
not be better than, say, a Google translation from Italian to English.

I know that there are other programmes implementing this kind of linking; I
suspect this is possible because some of them (for instance all the
guitar-specific applications) can make drastic simplifications on the
spectrum of possible notations. This is not possible for a general-purpose
programme like MuseScore.

So, I decided to throw the store and raise the question:

Rather than releasing MuseScore with a feature, which currently is buggy and
it is likely to never work well in the future, is it not the case to
withdraw this feature?

(Note: In theory, linking between staves of the same kind (standard with
standard or tab with tab) is less problematic, but I doubt it would be of
any real usefulness.)

As a bare minimum, this would involve removing the "Link Staff" button in
the Instrument Wizard; practical problems, like some compatibility with
existing 2.0 scores would not be very hard to solve (by ignoring the linking
data, it would be possible to read such a score with all its staves:
'simply', they would no longer be linked).

Thanks,

Maurizio



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