Enhanced timeline features for multi-user sharing

• Apr 6, 2022 - 16:15

The timeline is turning out to be a really useful tool, but some enhancements seem fairly obvious and might not be difficult to implement.

These include:

Additional "tracks" for extra components - such as user defined comments (or post it notes), lyrics etc.

The additional tracks could be associated with individual users, thus facilitating sharing.

Some tracks could be coloured differently.

The ability to select a section of a score by selecting it in the timeline.

A search feature to locate items quickly - including embedded text.

The ability to view the components of a track individually, or hide them. This feature already partially exists, for example for instrument staves, but for a large score with many instruments selecting the tracks to show or hide can be tedious. Profiles could be used to filter these.

See also https://musescore.org/en/node/330846


Comments

I like the idea of being able to add tracks. Selection is already possible using the instrument/measure display. not currently using the "metadata" display, but presumably that wouldn't be hard to add.

I'm not sure what you're asking about viewing or hiding "components of a track", but feel free to explain more detail. Note MuseScore 4 already includes a more useful Instruments window that will easily allow toggling visibility of instruments.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Viewing or hiding is difficult to explain without being able to dynamically record the way the Timeline works.

TL Tracks.png

If you look at the image here based on a timeline for a score with instruments flute, oboe, clarinet, bassson, harpsichord 1, harpsichord 2 (maybe those are just staves for the keyboard ...), then with an active score positioning the mouse (hovering) over the instrument name a little circle or a little eye will appear. Clicking on that will either display the stave in the score page, or hide it.

It is then possible to do edits to an instrument part directly without having to look at the rest of the score.

However, this only works for one instrument at a time. If one wanted - say to have only the brass section of an orchestra shown, then the appropriate settings would have to be done for each instrument. It would be better to be able to set up a profile for the groups of instruments, rather than doing them one at a time.

In order to check this out you have to work with an active timeline in a musescore file. It's not easy to capture this with a screen capture program because of conflicts with the program behaviour.

I was surprised when I discovered this feature - though how useful it really might be I'm not sure. It could be for allowing displays of subsets of instruments in large scores which otherwise would be difficult to follow.

You need to check this out with a score with several instruments which you are familiar with. Another use is to focus in on instrumental themes within a large scale work.

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