"hide empty staves" shows empty staves when all the contents are invisible
I'm preparing material to use for both printed SAB scores and rehearsal mp3's for a choir. When parts are in unison, I'd like to suppress printing of the Bass staff to save space. I still need the notes present in order to generate the Bass rehearsal mp3.
I tried making the notes (and everything else in the bass staff) invisible during the unison passages, and then set 'hide empty staves'. However, what I see is the empty staff (deleting the notes does hide the staff, but that's not what I need).
I've tried setting the relevant bars to be invisible in the bar properties dialogue (which, weirdly, has to be done for each bar separately), but this just leaves a gap on the page. Again, not what I need.
Is there a way of achieving what I want, please? Or is this a bug?
Thanks.
Comments
Have you tried: Edit/Instruments... untick "Visible"?
In reply to Have you tried: by Shoichi
Hide Empty Staves is working fine, in that the staves are not empty (they contain notes) so they are not being hidden. It is not, therefore, a bug but nor is what you want a feature currently supported by MuseScore. You could submit a feature request for "Hide staves when all bars in stave for that system are invisible" and another for "Permit selection of multiple bars to allow alteration of properties".
Shoichi,
Unticking Visible for the instrument will make it invisible throughout the score and not just at the unison parts?
Workaround - Create two scores - a full one to create the MP3 and one with the bass notes deleted in the unison parts so that Hide Empty Staves works.
In reply to Hide Empty Staves is working by underquark
Thanks for the comments.
I was rather thinking that was the issue - looks like a clash of "cultures" leading to a counter-intuitive result: from the programming POV the stave isn't technically empty; nevertheless from the user perspective there's nothing to print in it so it should (IMO) be treated as "empty".
I'll see about putting in a change request that either the existing option be redefined (I can't believe anyone can need the present behaviour, but stand to be corrected!) or that a new option be added.
I'm aware of the workaround, although this leads to increased maintenance effort. I'm wondering whether hacking on a musicXML export might be of some help: this issue is likely to arise (for me) in the future.
In reply to Thanks for the comments. I by mike scott
Another workaround, I try with an example:
in the score there are SABB;
Unison SAB (I) measures 1-3, second verse SAB (II) measures 4-6.
BI set to invisible (Edit / Instruments);
BII set to hide if empty;
Playback: the voices are played even if they are not shown