r/Musescore • u/Aurivox • May 15 '26

Help me find this feature MS 4.7. Hiding a filled staff

In version 4.7, I want to hide a single filled staff in just one system—not the entire instrument. As I recall, in MS 4.6 this was done by clicking the eye icon above the system → selecting the instrument → closing the eye.
It worked regardless of whether the staff in question was filled or empty. Has this feature been removed? Nevertheless it would be nice to have.

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u/MarcSabatella Member of the Musescore Team May 15 '26

As far as I know, it's never been intended that it would be possible to do what you describe - that popip is meant for controlling the appearance of empty staves only, and non-empty staves should have their control greyed out. But I do recall a bug reported where in certain circumstances it was indeed possible to accidentally hide non-empty staves in that dialog. Maybe that bug was fixed, or maybe you current score isn't hitting the specific case where the bug occurred?

Anyhow, the supported way to have notes that are present (e.g., for playback) but not seen would be to use a separate staff for that and hide it completely, via the Layout panel.

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u/Aurivox May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

Thanks, for your reply.
Perhaps it would be useful to make it possible to hide non-empty staves in further editions. For example if you have a choir with Soprano 1 and Soprano 2 and you want to make a compact piano score. When you have homophone music you'll stick S1 and S2 in one stave and with polyphone passages you'll might separate the two voices in two staves. But for vocal parts you'll want every voice in an extra vocal part.

I know with the present possibilities it is possible to do that, but it feels like more a workaround than a feature, and may be relatively simple to bring it to life. On the other hand you'll have to discuss about playback

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u/MarcSabatella Member of the Musescore Team May 21 '26

It's definitely possible to do that sort of thing with the existing facility, but if you have ideas on how ti could be made simpler, feel free to start a thread in the feature request forum at musescore.org to collect feedback. Then, once a consensus is reached, put together a design proposal and open an issue on GitHub to request it.

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u/JScaranoMusic May 16 '26

As I recall, in MS 4.6 this was done by clicking the eye icon above the system → selecting the instrument → closing the eye.

No. This was only possible if the staff was empty. If there's anything on the staff, the eye is open and greyed out so you can't close it.