is there a maximum for instruments you can have?

• Mar 27, 2011 - 19:46

I am wondering because it cuts off the score at a certain point


Comments

I suspect it's just running off the page. I don't know how many instruments you are trying to create, nor do I know if there are any actual limits, but it should be able to handle dozens of staves assuming you make them small enough, or the paper large enough, to fit. Layout->Page Settings is where you'd set both those parameters. I just tested and got 50 instruments onto one page by setting an appropriately small scale factor (0.5). It's unreadable, but they are there.

If you are creating a score you can set the page height to be up to 2000mm. You can get a lot of instruments into this space and still read them. You wouldn't print the whole score directly from this but you could use it as a master and save separate parts and you could copy and paste whole sections of instruments to a blank score for printing if you wished.

Attachment Size
Temp_BigPage.mscz 11.14 KB

In reply to by underquark

Fwiw, I have toyed with the idea of doing something like that for my scores. The problem with making the staff size small enough to fit on the paper that the score will actually be printed on is that when you later increase staff size for the parts, some items don't scale up correctly. That,s a bug in 1.2 that is already fixed in 2.0, and not *too* painful to work around, but I' thought about keeping my staves at full size even for scores but simply upping the paper size for the scores. For printing, I would generate PDF and use the scaling features in Adobe Reader to make it still fit on standard paper. I may try thiKs for my next large score - at least, the next score for instrumentation for which I don't already have a template I like.

What I would like to see in Musescore is a printing option that places only the used instruments on each page. That's the way professional scores are printed (or at least opera; I don't know about others). It doesn't make sense to have fifty staffs on the page if forty-eight of them are empty.

The professional printing as far as I can see is that you begin with all the instruments on the first page, empty or not empty, but as soon as page two, only the instruments that are in use are printed. While this would not be a good editing feature, as you don't know when you want to write for a certain instrument or not and would like all of them visible in case you change your mind, it would be a good printing feature to have for when you are submitting PDFs of your score.

Another idea, without changing the size of the instruments, is on the top-left of the page editor on layout, page settings is the page size editor and you can increase it until it is big enough.

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.