Select instruments visible in each system in MuseScore

• Sep 5, 2018 - 15:49

I am inputting notes where the choir comes in system 2 so system 1 should only contain piano notes. How do I hide the choir in the first system?

(hide empty staves only hides measures)

https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/74397/select-instruments-visi…

Comments

• Sep 5, 2018 - 16:14

I agree it could be a little bit confusing for the user. On the one hand staff means the staff of a specific instrument from the first measure until the last measure, on the other hand in this case "hide empty staves" means empty staves inside the system of a score in page view.

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• Sep 5, 2018 - 17:25

There word "staff" can sometimes be a bit ambiguous, and perhaps that is throwing you. Hide empty staves definitely hides staves - the set of five parallel lines running from the left edge of the page to the right. It hides empty staves on a system-by-system basis - if a staff has no notes on a given system, it is hidden. I suppose it could more accurately be called "Hide staves within systems if those staves are empty on that system" or something equally awkward, but I suspect that would just generate more confusion.

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• Sep 5, 2018 - 18:47

Agreed, it's an improvement :-). Not totally comfortable with the word "a" there, though, makes it sound like it only does it for one system. "each", maybe?

Also, the idea of more direct system-by-system control over this (eg, "hide empty staves in this system only") and other things comes up from time to time. Because a system is not a persistent object you can easily assign properties to, it hasn't seemed obvious how to accomplish this. But elsewhere I have proposed attaching this functionality to the break element. So in the properties for a system or page break, you could select things like like whether to hide empty staves on that system or not, also I imagined it being used to control whether fill (stretch to right margin) happens for that system or not, and a few other possibilities that had come to mind.

The new staff type change element could also be used for finer grained control, if you could set the "Hide when empty" property for staves there.

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• Sep 6, 2018 - 18:06

I would like the idea of such a feature (inside breaks (but it should be adjustable inside the inspector) or wherever too.

For example it could be useful for transcriptions in major works, where empty staffs for instruments are hidden in general, but visible for introducing some measures before they start again.

Without having much skills in coding I could imagine, it's not so difficult to implement - similar to the setting "never hide" in staff properties to have a similar setting for "don't hide" within a particular system.

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