Staff Type Change Feature Crashing MuseScore4

• Dec 16, 2022 - 23:21

I had a bug where when using the "staff type change" button in the layout palette, instead of being able to change the staff type, MuseScore instead just displayed the staff type I already had. When I tried to interact with it, the software crashed. I was able to repeat this multiple times across multiple scores on both a PC (Surface Pro 7) and MacOS (MacBook Pro).

As a bonus, here's an extra tidbit about why I was using it, since I feel like percussion music (especially chamber and solo percussion music) has gotten the short end of the stick in every previous MuseScore version. I would love to see its percussion notation capabilities rival Finale's or Dorico's and hope this might help a bit!

I'm writing percussion music which switches between one and multiple percussion instruments and sounds. As a result, there are times when composing where I might want to add or remove staff lines (for example, if I move from a marimba with five staff lines to a set of three unpitched instruments which would have three staff lines for the set, one per instrument). As it currently runs, MuseScore can change instruments and clefs, but cannot change staff types like this as easily. This makes multiple percussion solos or percussion ensemble music very hard to notate without giving the player multiple parts on the same page, resulting in a large amount of redundant rests taking up space whenever an instrument is not being played.

This is also true of individual instruments where the default staff line number is lower than is actually used in ensemble type music. A good example of this is the concert snare drum, which in MuseScore defaults to one line for one sound. While this makes sense, solo snare drum music typically uses a five line staff with the snare placed on the second to top space, with other spaces used for any extended techniques.

Again I hope this helps or is at least interesting! The new engraving interface is awesome!

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