Extract parts AND retain breaks?
One of those things that I've never grasped is how to maintain the line breaks in my master score when extracting its individual parts. (I want four bars per line.) How should I do this?
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Apply breaks after extract
this ability does not currently exist. As discussed on other threads recently, published music virtually never does this - each part normally is formatted however makes sense for that particular part. There are some special exceptions - some music for children's ensembles, for example. In these cases it might indeed be nice to have a way to force some consistency. Even then, it would more often be a case where the parts need the same formatting, but the score might still be different. So simply copying breaks from score to part wouldn't be enough to solve that particular problem. better might be a "copy breaks to other parts" command you could access from one given part. There could be other possible solutions as well. Feel free to describe more about your special situation so we can understand better what would actually help.
Meanwhile, if you simply want four bars per line in all your parts, for now, you will need to do Edit / Tools Add/Remove Line Breaks in each part.
This is rarely a desired effect due to differences in widths of measures from one part to the next so you cannot pass measures per line from a score to all the parts. If you want something like this you will have to do it manually in each part. This is one of those things you cannot do and apply to all parts as with some other option.
Perhaps they need to think about bringing back the measures per line feature. The problem with this is that it is impossible to put 4 of certain measures (in your example) on a line without changing the overall format of the score. When this happens you end up with "random" pages with 1 or 2 measures on them, which causes you to have to go back and manually adjust all the subsequent pages, which it what you wanted to avoid in the first place. To make the work even more tedious in this case, you not only have to add line breaks you also have to delete the ones you don't want. We will then have 10 times a many people posting to this forum telling us that the feature does not work compared to the few we now have requesting it.
I can think of maybe a single instance when you want every line to have the exact number of measures, and that is for a group of very young students (like under 7 or 8 years old), you can then tell them to start on line 3 of page 2 rather than try to explain rehearsal mark "B." In that case I would also not expect to have problems with each line containing 4 measures, but I also don't expect 200+ measure pieces, rather 10-20 measure pieces. Is it worth the time for a programmer to bring back this feature for such a rare occurrence?
In reply to This is rarely a desired by mike320
For the record, there never was a feature to absolutely fix the number of measures per line. The feature from a very old version of MuseScore that some people are remembering did *not* force all lines to the specified number of measures. It merely did the same basic thing the add/remove line breaks tool does: it ensured a *maximum* number of bars per line. So you might specify you want four measures per line, but if only three can actually fit given the staff size and musical content of the passage, then three is all you would get, and then there was no way to control what happened to subsequent lines. Nor was there a way to control ho pickup measures were counter, or voltas, or codas, etc. Nor was there a way to switch to part of the scroe have four measures per line but another part have three or six or whatever. And yes, these were very common complaints about the old facility, which is why it was scrapped in favor of the more powerful and flexible facility we have now.
That said, as I mentioned above, I can definitely see the value in certain special cases in having all parts have the same formatting, even though it doesn't make sense for *most* music. But attempting to address that need by forcing all lines to literally have the same number of measures does *not* solve the problem in general. It solves it only for the even more rare cases where not only do you want the parts to have the same formatting, but you *also* want a literally fixed number of measures per line with no possibility of overriding this to account for pickups, voltas, codas, or passages that are more or less dense than others. So it would be a lot of programming effort that still didn't solve the problem for most of the cases where people do want consistent formatting between parts.
What would be helpful would be for people who wish to see some new feature in this area to describe their actual use case in more detail so we can understand how to design a facility that would actually address all of the various cases people may have in mind.
I still suspect that something like what I described previously would be the way to go - a command you could run from either the score or any one of the parts that copied those breaks to all of the parts. Then you could format one part just how you liked - possibly with the add/remove line breaks tool, possibly manually, or some combination of these - and in one step get the consistent formatting.