Known limits

An honest list, so you can tell “battuta won’t do this” from “battuta can’t do this yet”.

By design — these will not change

battuta does not engrave. There are no spacing controls, no beam-angle handles, no dragging of notes or slurs, no page-layout panel. Verovio decides how notation looks; battuta decides what the notation is. If a rendering looks wrong, the fix is in the MEI or in Verovio, never in a nudged position.

Edit view is not a proof. Each measure is engraved on its own, so spacing is justified per measure rather than across the page, and spans crossing a tile edge (slurs, ties, hairpins, pedal) are drawn as broken continuations — the system-break convention, occurring more often. Page view is the ground truth.

battuta is not a DAW. Playback exists to audition edits and to verify the form.

Full MEI coverage is not the target. battuta understands Common Western notation as produced by Verovio-compatible tools. Anything else in your file is preserved verbatim rather than understood — safe, but not editable in the UI.

Not built yet

Missing	Notes
MusicXML export	Verovio converts from MusicXML, not to it. Import works — MusicXML, `.mxl`, ABC, Plaine & Easie and Humdrum all open
PDF / print output	SVG pages export exists; PDF does not (the SVGs print well from a browser)
Splice-at-caret and overlay-as-new-layer paste	Only replace-measures is implemented
Split view	Cross-file work happens through tabs
Selection playback, metronome, per-staff mute	The page-view player is all-or-nothing
Dynamics affecting playback volume	Notated, not performed
Verse 2+, melisma extenders, figured bass, percussion maps	One verse of lyrics ships; the rest is deferred
Part extraction, transposed parts	Deliberately deferred
Collaborative editing	Out of scope

Formerly on this list, now built: session restore and crash recovery, dirty-tab close confirmation, the external-change guard at save, import of every Verovio-readable format, MIDI/SVG/Humdrum/Plaine & Easie export — see Files — and, in 0.0.3, lyrics and playback through MIDI devices. Third-party plugins stay out of scope; the first-party extension architecture is what 1.0.0 built.

Rough edges

Verovio occasionally draws an exuberant curve on a slur continuation stub in edit view. Cosmetic, upstream, and absent in page view.
Very exotic repeat structures fall back to unexpanded playback rather than a guess.

Coming next

The extension architecture shipped in 1.0.0: features that would weigh the editor down are plugins and the editor is a host, so a capability you don’t use costs you nothing — see Plugins and What’s new. Next on the same points: a piano-roll reference layer (a MIDI take drawn behind the score, the way the pitch reference draws a recording’s pitch), OMR correction with the scanned source above each measure, and measure-by-measure alignment for the pitch reference, so a take with rubato lines up bar by bar. Third-party plugins stay out of scope. Requests are always welcome: file yours.

The two research features arrive as the first plugins built on that host:

Reference layers for transcription. Import MIDI (and the JSON sidecar a transcription pipeline emits) as reference tracks, drawn as translucent piano-roll bars behind the notation, aligned to each measure’s own pitch axis so a transcription error is visible at a glance. Per-track solo, mute and colour, plus selection playback against the reference grid.

OMR correction mode. Read MEI <facsimile>/<zone> data (or a sidecar from the OMR pipeline), show the source scan strip above each measure, click through between scan region and notation, tint elements by model confidence, and jump the caret through the flagged ones. Corrections can be written back as annotations so they feed the upstream model’s training data.