Exporting instrument changes to separate tracks in MIDI file

Hi all,

first of all, since this is my first post, I wanted to share some love! I recently started experimenting with MuseScore, since I'm trying to write some classical oriented music, and I must say I've been really impressed so far. This past year I discovered Lilypond, which I fell in love with (I've never written ideas down faster than with Lilypond) and made me think I'd never be able to get back to any WYSIWYG music editor, but MuseScore made me change my mind: maybe it's the fact that you can get pretty much everything done with keyboard shortcuts, which is closer to the feeling I have with Lilypond, but I've really enjoyed the time spent with it so far. Basically all the main challenges I faced, I managed to sort out thanks to the excellent documentation, so kudos for the excellent job!

The way Sequencer and Mixer work right now is probably the only thing I'm not super-fond of right now, though, which is the main reason for this new post. In particular (not the topic of this post, but related as a motivation for it), while having SFZ support via Zerberus is great, the way it needs to be configured is IMHO a bit intricate and not very flexible. More specifically, my main concern is the inability to save different "profiles" associated to a score I'm writing. Loading all the SFZ and associating them to the tracks results in a more sluggish performance while scoring (which is to be expected, since I'm using Virtual Playing Orchestra for that, and my laptop is not very beefy); on the other end, the default MuseScore soundfont is quite lightweight and so is very good while I write parts, but having a more "realistic" preview of the outcome would be nice. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way for me to save, let's say, two different "profiles" I can switch between: the "Save to score" becomes the new configuration for the score, which means that if I want to switch to a different one, I have to manually replace each individual instrument in the Mixer, which is incredibly time consuming. As a result, I decided to use MuseScore only for writing the score, keeping the default soundfont for the preview, and use Ardour instead for any rendering/mixing of higher quality versions of the current state (which I've used for other MIDI-based projects as well, and so am more familiar with).

Which (finally!) brings me to the main point of this post. The question I wanted to ask was related to instrument changes. I love how I can use the same staff in MuseScore to drive instrument changes, whether they're integrated (e.g., pizzicato and tremolo strings) or manual (instrument change added with a dedicated text, e.g., for a muted horn). The problem for me is that this instrument changes happen on the same track in the MIDI file: so if I have fast strings, which then become pizzicatos, then fast again, this is all a single track in the MIDI with instrument changes. This isn't an issue per se, and is probably helpful in many scenarios, but is for me since, as anticipated, I'm doing all the rendering/mixing in Ardour, where I can only assign a single instrument (e.g., using the Virtual Playing Orchestra SFZ files) to a track, and so such changes would have no effect. In my first experiments, I've had to manually duplicate the tracks with changes, assign the different instruments, and remove notes not belonging to either, which is a lengthy, error-prone and boring process.

From what I've understood looking at the documentation and a few other partially related posts, one way to take care of that would be using Parts: basically I could create a Part which contains all the main instruments, and other Parts containing one or more changes instead. If I'm not mistaken, this would allow me to generate more than one MIDI file containing the different instruments, giving me the separate tracks I need. Is this indeed a way to get this done, or is there a simpler way to export to a single MIDI file with the separate MIDI tracks instead?

Thanks in advance for your help!