Tip #15 - Details About MusEdit's Autosave Feature

MusEdit has an Autosave feature which is mainly intended to help protect your music entry efforts in case of a sudden crash in your system or other problem which might cause you to lose your work.

When you first install MusEdit the Autosave feature is configured to save your changes in all new files every time 30 characters are entered. After working on a new file for a little while the Autosave dialog will pop up (see attached image). If you don't want to Autosave DON'T SIMPLY HIT THE CANCEL BUTTON! This is a big source of confusion for MusEdit users! "Cancel Changes" means "ignore any changes I have made in this dialog", it doesn't mean "Cancel Autosave". To turn off Autosave for the score you are working on, click on the "Don't Autosave" radio button. If you don't click on "Don't Autosave" MusEdit will ask you for a file name, and it will keep nagging you for this even if you hit Cancel on the file save dialog.

If you do want to use Autosave (and I highly recommend it!) you can adjust how frequently it autosaves. Every 30 characters is quite frequent, but I use it because I think it's better to err on the side of safety.

Alternatively you can used "timed autosave" (a common feature in other programs) by selecting "Minutes elapsed" instead of "Characters entered". Timed autosave will interrupt your work on a more predictable schedule, but one danger with timed autosave is that it will happen automatically, even if you (or MusEdit!) messed things up and you are busy staring at your screen trying to figure out what went wrong. With "Character count" saving will not occur unless you keep adding characters, which you probably won't do after a mess-up.

Finally, please note that you can use File|Set Preferences|Autosave to set your own Autosave preferences for all new scores you create. These settings will affect NEW scores which you create, but they won't affect your older scores or scores you got from someone else. You will have to go to File|Autosave to adjust the settings for those scores when you open them.

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