Troubleshooting

Editing

A letter key does nothing / types a note unexpectedly. Check the INPUT (i) box in the status bar. In input mode a–g are pitches, so commands bound to those letters wait until you press esc. The flat is v in input mode, f or v outside it.

A key does something different from what this guide says. Someone rebound it — possibly you. Open 🌣, check the binding, and use reset all if you want the defaults back. Also check the layout toggle: QWERTY and AZERTY have different punctuation defaults.

Nothing responds to the keyboard at all. A dropdown or text field probably has focus (a focused select swallows the keyboard). Click on the score, or press esc.

“entry refused” at a beam, tuplet or barline. A longer note would have to eat across a boundary. Shorten it, or clear the obstacle first. Beams are not an obstacle — battuta un-beams the measure for you.

A meter change is refused, naming a measure. That measure’s content no longer fits. Fix it, or set the meter before entering notes; whole-measure rests always fit.

Merge is refused. The two durations don’t add up to a single writable note (a half plus an eighth). Use a tie instead.

A tuplet is refused. It wants exactly 3 or 6 consecutive notes whose freed time can be written as rests.

A paste is refused. The toast names the measure and staff: usually a voice whose durations don’t sum to the target measure, or a fragment that runs off the end of the score. Paste into a region of the same shape, or add measures first.

Retrograde was “skipped”. The passage’s chord sizes don’t mirror, so pitch content can’t be reversed onto the rhythm. Inversion still works.

Edits land on the wrong note; control events point at the wrong place. The file probably has duplicate xml:ids. Press ⟲id in the header — one undo step, and every id and reference is re-minted consistently.

Rendering

A slur or tie looks broken in the middle of the score. Expected in edit view: spans crossing a tile edge are drawn as continuations. Switch to page view to see the real curve.

Spacing looks uneven between measures. Also expected in edit view — each measure is justified on its own. Page view justifies across the system.

A measure looks wrong after a clef or key change. Check where the change actually sits: battuta writes clef changes before the barline of the following measure, which is the engraver’s position. If the change should be a measure earlier or later, move the caret there and set it again.

Something looks wrong in both views. That is worth reporting — with the .mei file. Rendering is Verovio’s, so the fix is either in the MEI battuta wrote or upstream.

Playback

Playback controls are missing. They only exist in page view. Switch views in the header.

Playback stopped on its own. Any edit, tab switch or view switch stops it: the timeline is computed from the document, and an edit makes it stale.

The audio plays but the notes stop lighting up. Report it — a repeat pass that highlights nothing is a mapping bug, and the sort that got fixed once already.

Repeats aren’t taken. Plain repeat barlines and voltas are; one D.S./D.C. jump is. Structures battuta can’t resolve play straight through, once, by design.

No sound at all on Linux. The desktop build plays audio through WebKitGTK’s GStreamer stack. Make sure your distribution’s GStreamer base and good plugin sets are installed, and that the system mixer isn’t muting the app.

MIDI

My keyboard isn’t detected. Watch the MIDI square in the status bar; it goes green with a count when a device connects, and it is hot-plug aware. On Linux, MIDI goes through ALSA — the .deb depends on it; with the AppImage on a minimal system you may need to install it. In a browser, only Chromium implements Web MIDI.

Notes play but nothing is entered. Turn on input mode. battuta hints at this the first time you play a note with input off.

Platform

macOS: “battuta can’t be opened”. The disk image is unsigned. Open it from Finder’s context menu → Open, or xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/battuta.app.

macOS: the Dock icon looks grey. Fixed in current builds. If you still see it, purge the icon cache: rm -rf "$(getconf DARWIN_USER_CACHE_DIR)/com.apple.iconservices"* then killall iconservicesagent Dock Finder.

Linux: double-clicking a .mei opens a text editor. The association is registered by the package; set battuta as the default application for the type once in your file manager.

A dialog opens in the wrong folder. battuta remembers the last folder you opened or saved in, and falls back to your home directory if it no longer exists.