Selection and playback with multiple instruments
Reported version
4.0
Type
Functional
Frequency
Many
Severity
S5 - Suggestion
Reproducibility
Always
Status
active
Regression
No
Workaround
No
Project
Hi,
When playing a part with at least two instruments, if a specific bar in a specific instrument is selected, only this instrument will play. Musescore 3 used to play all instruments in that case, and it allowed for an easy navigation and jumping during playback. Now you have to select one specific note to have that behaviour.
I think this should be an option of some kind, because if I really want to play only one instrument, i'll just go into its individual part.
Y.
Comments
Just wanted to express my support for this reversion to the way things used to work. The now-prominent and easy-to-toggle mixer panel was always my go-to for listening to individual parts and groups of parts (mute and solo get the job done) in MuseScore 3, and the action of replaying an entire score should, in my opinion, be the "default." I actually believed that the application was bugged when I first clicked on a staff and only heard the corresponding part play. The design choice seems unintuitive to me for two reasons. First, given that the default way to view a score is with all of the parts displayed together (individual and subset part views must be explicitly and separately created), I think it follows that the default way to hear a score played back is with all of the parts blended together. Second, the new approach for performing this action, which is clicking on an individual note or rest, is much harder to do than the approach for playing back just a single part, which is selecting any measure group or range. The majority of music staves are empty space, after all! Lastly, I think it is important to consider that users who want to listen to an individual part are likely to want to reuse that playback option many times in a row, and users who want to listen to the whole score are likely to want to reuse that playback option many times in a row, before switching. Therefore, the ability to either go somewhere different for each function (e.g., a part view) or set a toggle (e.g., by using the easily accessible solo and mute buttons) seems like a better solution to me. Cheers for all the amazing work on the latest version of MuseScore 4, contributors!
I third the motion.
I'm finding it really annoying to have to select all parts, particularly since if I am zoomed out it's really hard to select any measures.
Let's use the Mixer to solo instruments and the default playback should be all instruments.
Many thanks MuseScore team for providing such an excellent tool, it's really pro standard.
In reply to I third the motion. I'm… by ben146
Found a solution in another thread.
Just click on a single note rather than select the whole measure. Then all instruments will play.
Not a bug, but (currently) by design.
I support this suggestion. The situations when I want to hear one instrument alone are very few -- I usually want to hear all instruments at once since I write for small groups. It is much harder to select a note accurately than a measure, and it disrupts my workflow that the operation that was one click in MS3 is now usually two (inaccurate) clicks. I would really like an "always play all instruments" toggle in the settings.
As this issue tracker is being discontinued, better report this on GitHub https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/new/choose