More useAccidentalDisplay questions

[rpatters1]

My question is what is the committee's recommendation about how to import accidentals.json into a fully functional notation program, such as MuseScore. Though it is fully functional, there is no way to know without running an entire score layout whether the note will end up with an accidental. (A Finale import would have the same problem, though with perhaps less overhead to find out the answer.)

This leaves us with the following options for honoring useAccidentalDisplay set to true.

Force every accidental.

In this case, the program would force every accidental, irrespective of the force flag. This would achieve the expected result, but it would make for a very user-hostile MuseScore document. Any further user-editing would be the slag mines because all the accidentals are stuck.

Furthermore, it does not seem to be in the spirit of the data to force hide/show accidentals when the force flag is not set. If this is the intent, it should probably be called out explicitly in the documentation.

Ignore useAccidentalDisplay.

In this case, the program would ignore useAccidentalDisplay and only process accidentalDisplay items with force set to true. This works really well in MuseScore, except for the final courtesy D-nat in the accidentals.json example.

So my question is, shouldn't the D-natural in that example have force set to true, even with useAccidentalDisplay turned on? If we specified that courtesy accidentals should always be marked force, I think we could have the best of both worlds.

[rpatters1]

I would like to add that I found a way to determine if a note should have an acci in MuseScore, so there is a third way to honor useAccidentalDisplay that is probably the most correct:

Check the acci state and override if needed.

In this version, when useAccidentalDisplay is true, the consuming program runs its algorithm to see if a note should have an acci or not. If that agrees with the accidentalDisplay, the program does nothing. If it disagrees, it forces the accidental to what accidentalDisplay says irrespective of the value of force.