If the “Hide Empty Staves” choice is set to “Never” then theoretically you shouldn’t be able to select “Allow individual staves of multi-staff instruments to be hidden”, or select any players to be “excluded” below – since, after all, the setting is set to “Never”, and you can’t have exceptions to “Never” – unless —
As I’ve said on another thread, it’s sometimes useful to have a single stave of a multi-stave instrument appear in a full score, even if it’s resting, I’ve worked with conductors who prefer to have a page of rests rather than a score which jumps around wildly with stave count from page to page. In this case, I wish I could set “hide empty staves” to “Never” but also allow for multi-stave instruments to have individual staves appear. A good example would be if you have an orchestral score with marimba, piano, celesta and harp, all of whom are resting at odd intervals. Hiding one of their empty grand staves could save a lot of room.
It’d be handy to have a “select all” and “select none” button at the “Players excluded from Hide Empty Staves” dialogue. My rule now is to select all instruments except percussion, which takes quite a lot of individual player clicking in an orchestral template.
I can feel it already. Tantacrul will mention #1 when he makes his Dorico roast video. Mark my words, lol. (Although, tbh, it doesn’t bother me. That way if you change from never to one of the other options the options are still selected and ready. It would be much worse if whenever you clicked never and then changed your mind you lost all your previous settings.)
As for 2, this seems a bit of an odd one to me… I understand saving room, but by the same token, (and I’m sure there is room for disagreement here) if I was conducting and suddenly there were a bunch of single stave instruments where my eye was expecting grand staff instruments, I’d find it just as jarring as if there were rapid shifts in score layouts. I think this is a bit of an all or nothing game… either you hide empty staves, or you don’t (unless there is a really extended period where the instruments are silent).
Regardless, hopefully V3 will bring more control over when staves can be hidden or not (perhaps with a system like the current signposts for instance).
I’m sure plenty of people would appreciate a select all/none.
So am I. I’m also terrified, lol. Honestly, I think his roasts are actually pretty fair/insightful. His Sib. shred was utterly hysterical, and while I thought the one on Musescore was funny too (“your time will come Dorico… laugh while you can…”) he actually made really good points. His other videos are interesting too. You can tell he puts quite a lot of thought into most of them.
For what it’s worth, in orchestral arrangements of things, 1-staved versions of grand-staff instruments are more prevalent than not. It’s good to have the option - with Marimba and Celesta especially, but with harp and piano sometimes, too.
Here’s one to activate his UI antennae. Spot the “missing” clickable area on the text editing dialog. Actually it’s not missing, it’s just very hard to see something that is 100% transparent. And if you can’t see it, how do you know it’s there if you are a beginner?
I can not imagine a better solution as in “other” software - select staves you would like to hide or to show and…hide or show them. There is no need to reinvent a bicycle…Would be great if Dorico could do it one day as well…
I guess you have never got in a tangle in Sibelius when the system breaks have moved, and half the bars on a staff are marked as “hidden” and the other half are not.
That may not be a problem until later (when you have forgotten about the hidden bars) you do another edit that moves the system breaks again, and suddenly staves start appearing and disappearing on their own, regardless of whether they have any music on them!
Not to mention the vertical spacing difference between showing and hiding a completely invisible staff (no staff lines, no notes, no whole bar rests, no bar lines…)
Luckily I didn’t. You do mostly such formatting, when your piece is already finished. And in a worst case you can ever let Sibelius show everything again. Probably Dorico team will find a better solution? Any way I am sure they are aware - to be able to hide just everything or nothing will never meet needs of professional engravers.
