Hide empty systems even if there are hidden meter changes

Dear Doricians,

I have been working these days on the quintet in Bizet’s Carmen (n°15) and came across many difficult stuff, and found Dorico (as usual) did a wonderful job. Apart from my questions about hyphenated crescendi and diminuendi (I already created another thread about that), I came across a real problem I could not solve. It’s a piece of music with synchronized different meters (6/16 at the piano, 2/8 at some singers staves) that change during the piece. Fortunately, I learned Claude Lapalme’s workaround (really brilliant) using anachrousis at the meter change and then back to the original hidden meter and hidden tuplets all the way.

As you can see on the picture, I have a system where three systems are empty (of music), but there is this mess with hidden meterings. Could it be made possible that those staves were hidden automatically, even with those meter changes? The only solution I see here would be to split flows, and I do not like this solution.

Thanks for considering this — or build a “Dorico way” to synchronize different meters :slight_smile:

Thanks Marc - this passage from Carmen looks great! Another idea (which I’m sure has already been suggested) would be to make it possible to hide staves on an individual basis. For me this would be enormously useful: hiding empty staves automatically, all the time, doesn’t always give me the fine-grained control I’m looking for.

I suppose another option, which you’ve probably already thought of, is to use option shift M to put your time signature only on the staves you need; then put it back invisibly when the empty staves re-appear. But that is very inflexible.

Hiding staves individually is number one on my list of things that I can’t do without.
Using flows for this is nuts and far too time (and brain) consuming.

Wouldn’t the ultimate solution be for Dorico not to count time sig changes as musical events that cause otherwise empty staves to show?

I agree with Derrek… My problem is the metric change seems to be considered as a musical event, even when hidden.

Stephen, I did have to use option shift M to create those metric changes — since the piano is still in 6/16…

Oops - what I meant to say is, wait to use option shift M in your empty staves until they are no longer empty. So the empty staves will still be in 6/16. Will that work?

Yes, that could work — it’s just not what the original score was showing (the end of the left page shows the metric change in all singers’ staves) but would still be musically correct.