The Sibelius Forum

I'm using Sibelius 7 First, and I'm getting the problem shown in the attachment. I don't know how it appeared, and I can't get these bars to rejoin (it's the same instrument, same piece of music, and it plays back fine). If I drag the barlines around, the break seems to pop up in other places, or similar breaks appear.

Except in very special circumstances DO NOT DRAG BARLINES in Sibelius.

Open the inspector.
Select the bar AFTER the gap
Change the value in "Bars-->Gap Before" to 0

Thanks for your reply, but as I said, I'm using First. There is no "Inspector", as far as I'm aware.

If there is no way to fix this in First, it's not a huge problem - I can just copy the notes elsewhere and delete the bars in question (either side of the gap). I just thought there might be a fix I'm missing.

By the way, dragging bars is not something I generally do, but is there a reason why it's so important not to do it?

Yes - you almost invariably end up in a mess like this. Let Sibelius do the formatting and tweak it after you've finished putting in the notes!

I finally managed to duplicate this by creating a page break and then dragging the first bar on the new page to the right and then removing the page break again. I managed to cure it by selecting the invisible barline immediately after the gap and pressing [ctrl][shift]p (Reset position).

Thanks again. I wouldn't actually tweak barlines before putting in any notes - only occasionally once it's finished. But I'll bear your warning in mind! I suspect I caused the problem something like the way you describe; I was working on formatting a file supplied to me as a midi, which was a bit of a mess already.

But your last suggested command works: if I select the barline at the beginning of that second bar (which is not invisible in my case) and press ctrl+shift+p, that fixes it! I wasn't aware of that command, so I'll bear it in mind next time I get tempted to do any foolish tweaking...

MIDI, MusicXML and other imported files can be a real PITA to edit. I know that sometimes, particularly on older mice, it is sometimes possible to grab a barline and drag it accidentally. I've done it quite a lot myself.

As to the keyboard shortcut for reset position, you should look in the manual for other useful keypresses that work in First:

[ctrl][shift]n - reset note position
The big [return] key on the main keyboard will toggle note spellings
[alt]shift][left/right arrow] will widen or narrow the spacing within a selection and so on.