All my formatting that I have done to the score has to be re-done in the parts.
I can understand that certain aspects of notation should be independent between the score and the parts — fingering, system and page breaks, for example — but MuseScore tosses out everything I have done in the score, and the parts all revert to defaults. These are the sorts of things I'm talking about:
Measure properties. All my parts have different measure numberings than the score.
Time signature properties not only have to be set for every staff, but re-set in every part.
Triplets, dynamics, anything really. If I make things invisible, they show up again in the parts, but not always, which is weird. Fingerings should not show in the score, only the parts (an exception).
Staff lines. I make them dashed in the score, but they remain continuous in the parts.
Anything I invert — slurs, prall lines, articulations, text — has to be re-done in the parts
The custom positioning of dynamics, and everything else, all need to be re-adjusted in the parts.
Format/Style and Page Settings also have to be re-done separately. At least give an option when adjusting for the score to also apply to all the parts.
Maybe a options in the inspector for "score and parts", "score only" and "parts only" is a possible solution for all of these items.
It would be great to be able to export your custom style settings and apply them to other documents, to keep your publications consistent.
Also, something that really should be independent, or have the option to be: Frames. Sometimes in parts, movements break in the middle of a page. I'd like to add a vertical frame to give a little space before the next movement — but this adds it to the score and all the other parts as well, which may break differently. Also, appending a frame at the end of a short page so the systems are not so widely spaced adds an extra page to the score and the other parts.
All of this is frustrating because it makes for a lot of extra work, as well as errors.
Thank you.
Comments
Many of these properties get retained if you simply wait to generate parts until after doing those things. Generally, that's always good advice, for this reason and others.
Style and page layout are almost always different between score and parts - scores for instance are typically on different sized paper with smaller staves, parts typically have multimeasure rests turned on, etc. But parts do normally have the same layout as each other, so there is and apply to all parts button for that purpose.
Making things visible/invisible differently in parts versus score is a very important ability, that's why changes made after parts are generated don't link. It's very common to want a note visible in the part but not score or vice versa.
Manual adjustment to position seldom makes sense to do the same way in both score and parts. After all, most of the times one does this, it's to avoid a collision with some other element on some other staff, or something very specific to the current width of the measure - and none of this is the same in between score and parts. So again, it's pretty crucial that manual adjustment be independent.
Time signature and measure properties probably should be linked. As I recall, measure properties partially are and partially aren't, and there was an attempt to get the rest of the measure properties to be linked but it caused problems so the change had to be reversed.
And yes, having unlinked frames would be nice in many cases.
Anyhow, long time, we definitely want more controls over what gets linked by default and what doesn't as well as better overrides. See for instance #25248: Add ability to explicitly break links between linked staves/parts.