"Hide empty staves" change request - or new option "hide staves with no visible content"
"Hide empty staves" will display blank staves when the contents are set to invisible. This situation can arise, for example when preparing choral music to be used both for printing and for preparing rehearsal audio: eg in extended unison passages, it would be good to be able to hide the "duplicate" parts on the printed material, while still producing a complete audio track.
The only present workaround seems to be to maintain two copies of the score, one for printing (with some notes deleted completely) and one for audio production, which is clearly a poor idea.
Intuitively, I would have expected that if nothing is to be printed, a staff should be a candidate for hiding, and I can't imagine circumstances where the present behaviour is desirable (I may be wrong!) So would it be possible please to either
1. Change the meaning of "hide empty staves" to mean hide any staff where nothing is to be printed, or
2. Add a new option "hide staves with no visible content".
Thanks.
Comments
I am having trouble understanding the distinction you are making. But I suspect that there is already a way to do whatever it is you are trying to do. Could you attach a score you are having problems with and describe the issue more specifically?
In reply to I am having trouble by Marc Sabatella
Thanks for your reply. Sorry I wasn't clear enough in my original posting.
I'm attaching two files to try to illustrate the issue. There's a dummy test .mscz file ( Untitled.mscz ) and a pdf ( Untitled.pdf ) made from it. I'm using musescore for two purposes: printed material for my choir, plus corresponding midi files for home rehearsal material.
The vocal lines sometimes differ, sometimes are in unison for extended periods. During the unison sections, I'd like to save space and only print the top line, but advice from the support forum is that there's no way of achieving this.
I'd expected that making the lower part notes/rests invisible, and setting 'hide empty staves' would do - but musescore counts the invisible notes as making the staves non-empty, and so prints empty staves. It seems counter-intuitive to me (and indeed I cannot see any need for this behaviour). There's a distinction to be made between a staff that contains nothing and a staff that prints nothing - it's the latter that the user is more concerned with, I believe.
I can't make the individual bars invisible, as this leaves gaps on the page (pointless!). I can't make a whole voice invisible (edit|instruments) as then I don't see that part at all!
The only way of suppressing print of the lower staves in the unison section seems to be to delete the notes - then indeed the staves are empty and are suppressed. But then, no sound either for rehearsal!
Hence my suggestion to alter the semantics of "hide empty voices" to mean 'hide staves where nothing prints' rather than the current one of 'hide staves with nothing in them'. It seems more useful!
I hope that's a bit clearer?
In reply to Thanks for your reply. Sorry by mike scott
I could see why this might be desired if you tried doing it that way, but that's not the best way to do it. You say you can't make a whole staff invisible, but sure you can - just have it be a separate staff. So you'd have three staves - one for the top part, one (visible) for the bottom part for print purposes, and one (invisible) for the bottom part for playback purposes. The Hide empty staves can do the right thing.
It is of course technically possible to check for invisible notes and declare a part empty if that is all it contains, but that would break some of the legitimate use cases for invisible notes - to create specific spacing combintions, to attach spoken lyrics to, etc. From an implementation perspective, it would also slow down layout, as we'd have to do a separate check for visibility of every element associated with that staff rather than the very quick-and-dirty check we do now. So I'd only be in favor of a change like this if there were a real world use case not easily handled another way.
In reply to I could see why this might be by Marc Sabatella
Sorry for delay in responding.
As it happens, I've had a reprieve on this one - I've been told not to worry about making all parts play back. So I can simply delete the notes from the other parts, and suppress empty staves on the printout. Looks fine, IMO the rehearsal material I'm generating is inadequate, but the MD is happy.
But I must say I'm not keen on your proposed solution. It requires maintaining two copies of the same information, which very much goes against my instincts of what's proper in program design.
From my usage so far, it seems to me (& IMBW) that the designed basic entity is the staff, which "owns" the notes. If the part were basic, and the staff merely somewhere to display them (as is the case in abc, which is where I've been for several years), I feel several of the problems I've seen mentioned or experienced could be easily avoided, this being one in particular.
I think as regards the present problem, there's no really good solution. But thank you for your help anyway.
In reply to Sorry for delay in by mike scott
Oh, I agree it's not a *good* solution. More just a way to get things done for now that I think beats other alternatives. Eventually, I agree there should be something to support this use case, but as I mentioned, I don't think changing the existing behavior of hide empty staves with respect to invisible notes is the answer. An automated way of maintaining the staves might be preferable, for instance.
Mike Scott: With music for my chorus, I have exactly the same situation you discuss. I'd like to hide certain staves on certain pages (typically where parts sometimes share a staff and sometimes want to appear on different staffs). I could do this using Sibelius, but would rather use MuseScore. Did you ever find a MuseScore solution?
In reply to Mike Scott: With music for by jghiselli
What I've done in some of my compositions is to make the printed instrument entirely non-playback, and have an invisible copy instrument of it for playback purpose. Disadvantage is (quite obvious) you have two sets of notes to maintain.