Musescore 4 - Customized Parts not saving / Customizations of Parts not saving

Some brief context: Working on orchestrating a local musical. 4 winds, 4 strings, piano and up to 4 voices. Currently working on creating a Piano/Vocal part. What I had also done was add a third, small, treble staff above the piano part in case I needed to indicate there was a line from an orchestral instrument they may need to play for rehearsal purposes. Am using Musescore 4.1.1, which, according to the program, is the latest version.

There are 2 likely methods one could use to create this part:

1 - Use the existing Piano part that Musescore automatically generates, and just make the vocals visible on that, then format the layout to my liking.

2 - Create a custom Piano / Vocal part and add Piano and Vocals to that, so that the piano can still be its own separate part.

I started this evening by using Method 2, and everything was going swimmingly. I had created parts and exported them.


I had gotten about 4 cues in via this process when I realize that I had forgotten to change something on the previous cues.

So I went back in to edit the newly minted piano vocal parts. Only to discover:
a) Musescore did remember that it created a part.
b) it didn't remember what that part was, only that it might have had vocals on it, and just had a part named "Vocal"

c) when I opened the part, it was Completely Blank.

Puzzled by this, I decided to try out method 1 to test what was happening. I opened the piano part and made the vocals visible.

I also, in the parts editor, changed the name of the part to "Piano/Vocal".

Made whatever changes were needed, and exported this part. Saved the whole file.
Reopened the file, and found that:

a) The piano part was still there, but it did not remember that I had changed its name to Piano / Vocal.

b) The piano part that was still, but the vocals were no longer visible. (Image 8)

What is clear is that something is going buggy with Musescore's ability to save parts and data points of parts within an overarching file. I've scanned through all the settings, and the handbook, and the forum to see if anyone else has had this issue. I may have missed something, but this doesn't seem to have come up before. Moreover, this is definitely a bug. I don't think Musescore is expected to be like this. If I create a part, or edit an existing part, it should save as I last had it. Why it's not doing this... I have absolutely no idea.

Ultimately, I can go through an create the parts I need, double and triple check them, and then export them. But this will make going through and making any edits I need on specific parts really draggy. Because I'm no longer just editing an existing part as I last had it, I have to go in, remake the part and apply all the previous edits, and then make sure changes are applied. A bit of an unnecessary hassle, I'm sure you'd agree.

Hoping others may have some insight as to what this is - looking forward to hearing some feedback. Hope everyone else is having a lovely day / weekend!