Suggest an option to easily play one or only certain instruments
This is a suggestion I made a couple of years ago, but maybe there's a new sheriff in town, so ....
Currently you can select a starting note and hit spacebar, and MuseScore will play the score from that point. It would be helpful to me and presumably others to have an option that allows you to select just one instrument or section and play from the selected point. Accomplishing that in the current version is extremely cumbersome.
What I suggest is allowing the user to click on a particular instrument's note and hit some key other than spacebar - Enter or F10 or Alt-spacebar or whatever seems appropriate and doesn't conflict with an existing key option - and have MuseScore play that instrument only from that point.
An extension of that idea would be to allow the user to select multiple instruments - either by selecting one instrument, holding down the Shift key, and clicking above or below on the same note for another instrument to select all the instruments in between ....
or by clicking on one instrument's note, holding down the Ctrl key, and one by one selecting the other instruments you want to hear together, even if they're not adjacent.
Sometimes it's hard to hear clearly one instrument among many, or maybe you want to hear just the harmony between two or three instruments. Or just one section at a time.
Another suggestion is to have a mechanism to find out what the tempo is at any point. Select a note or measure, hit "T" (or whatever), and have a popup box tell you what the tempo is - andante or quarter note = 80 or whatever. In a long piece you may have forgotten what the current tempo is and it's a bother to scroll back to find the last tempo spec. Since Musescore obviously retains that information, since you can play a score from whatever measure is selected, it shouldn't be difficult to program.
Comments
Use the mixer and solo one or mute others
In reply to Use the mixer and solo one… by Jojo-Schmitz
Well he knows how to use the mixer.
Problem is that while working on a multi instruments score you frequently need to hear bits of different instruments and having to use the mixer at each of these simple "let's listen the next three notes of just the viola" is too heavy compared to the asked feature to have an additional shortcut to spacebar doing that action: listen the instrument of the currently selected note.
Such a feature has been implemented, it's more a matter of deciding how to best present it. I would expect to see something like this for MuseScore 4,
But - are you trying to do this by muting everything except the track in question? That would indeed be "extremely cumbersome". But one key to open the mixed,r one click to solo an instrument, it's not that bad meanwhile.
I'm glad to see that this feature will be implemented!! Coming from Notion that has just the perfect behavior when the need for listening to groups of parts separately was frequent. Four years after this feature request by Craig Wilson, this is what I miss the most in MuseScore, alongside with non-contiguous measure selection ablity (with "ctrl+click" additive selection behavior, like in most softwares), which is a requirement for the first one to be as useful as expected. In Notion, "click" then "shift+click" was used to select an area in between two points, then "ctrl+click" was used to add the same time selection of any additionnal staff, contiguous or not.
There is also something that could be requiered to achieve the perfect selective listening workflow: the ability to change the behavior of the playback start point: After the selection of non-contiguous areas in the score, we would use "shift+play" or something to launch playback while listening to the only instruments that were included in the selection, then hit stop. The problem is, if we want to listen back to the selected area, we'll have to click on its beginning and unfortunately clear the selection, otherwise playback will start back where it stopped (I know that repeat mode could solve the problem, but would have to be triggered each time, since this is not the desired behavior apart from that). I suggest to:
>> Have an option to permanently change the playback start point behavior, from the regular "defined at the previous stop point or new selected note / area" to "defined at the previous start point or new selected note / area" (regular DAW behavior that is the best for composing purpose IMO)
>> Automatically define the start point at the previous start point when "selective listening playback" function is triggered
I assume this function could not be seen as critical as claimed here for guys who don't use musescore as a composing tool for large bands, but please belive that it is (I think guys from Sibelius and Notion did implement it for some reason...), so when it comes about the right moment to realise it, I think we'll say ASAP! Most of my collegues won't disagree, according to discussions we used to have when it comes to notation software, and about switching to Musescore (mostly from Sibelius...), that is more and more recognized as a serious option within my professionnal environnement (I hope I am a good seller ;-) ).
I hope I make my-french-self clear in english...