Marking barlines for syncing and Autoprogress

When entering PDF based scores, there are a number of situations where it is interesting to mark every barline.

Below an example of a page in a piece of sheet music where this has been done.

When is it useful or necessary to mark all the measure/barlines?

• For enabling autoprogress based on tempo. For this to work, we must know (at least) how many measures there are on a staff line
• When entering sheet music for an ensemble, and you want to centralize the progress. As different instruments will have different layout, it is necessary to be able to progress measure by measure so everyone is always on the same position. For this, all parts/voices must be marked with all measure lines.
• For making annotations on can be copied to another edition with another layout.

How to recognize barlines?

A starting point is to let the program find all the barlines. The success of this depends a lot on the sheet music (manually/computer engraved) and the scan quality (we need absolutely straight lines – a photo of a wobbly piece of paper will not work at all). One does this by going through each page, and hitting the “Find Measure Lines” button. The process of recognizing will take a number of seconds – depending on the speed of your PC.

Measure lines recognition is never perfect. So one must correct the starting point offered by the program.

• Removing false barlines is as simple as clicking on the wrong barline.
• Adding missing barlines is as simple as clicking on the barline in the scan.

What about multi-measure rests?

When autoprogressing, we need to “stop” for a given time at multi-measure rests. For this, we need to know how many measures are in that rest. To enter this:

• Double click on the barline to the right of the multimeasure rest
• Type the number of rests on your keyboard.

The result will look like this:

Simplification for autoprogress

When you only want to enter barlines for autoprogress for personal use, you can skip full barline entering. When progressing for personal use, it is enough for the program to know the number of measures in one line of music.

So an alternative to recognizing all the barlines is to simply double click on the barline at the end (right) of the staff line and type to number of measures in the staff line on your keyboard – just as you do for multimeasure rests.

You will also need to mark all the beginning/end of repeat barlines so the program knows how to stop at those places.

Marking barlines for syncing and Autoprogress