Remember instrument collection

[VictorEijkhout]

Your idea

I almost exclusively write for Early Instruments > Woodwinds. However, any time I open the instruments panel it opens to Common, even if I had been in Early > Woodwinds in the same session. Please remember choice, at least in a session, and preferably per document.

Problem to be solved

This would save me a ton of repetitive clicking.

Prior art

No response

Additional context

No response

[shoogle]

The options are to remember the genre and group in the instruments dialog:

• Per document
• Per session
• Persistently across sessions (like we remember "Choose instruments" vs. "Create from template" in the New Score dialog)

[cbjeukendrup]

Since creating a new score currently starts a new session (new MuseScore instance) if a score is already opened, the second option might not be very effective. So the best candidates are 1 and 3.

[MarcSabatella]

I'm not a huge fan of option 3. Some people might write more or less exclusively in one genre or another, but I suspect most don't. On the other hand, I almost never use the dropdown anyhow since the search bar is at least as easy for most purposes. when I need to access instruments outside the "common" set. So it wouldn't faze me personally.

On the other hand, if you do mostly write for one specific genre, I'm pretty sure option 1 doesn't help much. Most of the instruments added to scores happen on initial creation of the score. Option 1 helps only if you're often going back to add more instruments.

Templates are also worth thinking about here. If you're always writing for the exact same type of ensemble, you don't need to ever touch the instrument selection page after the first score - just save it to your templates folder for easy reuse. But assuming you are creating music for the same genre but with different instruments, you could still create a template called "Renaissance" that has some token instruments to start with. If the genre setting were saved to score, and were copied into new scores created from the template, that might allow option 1 to work well enough.

This then would lead me to wish a template could actually be empty as far as instruments are concerned (can they?) and only be about style & page settings - plus the genre selection. Also, I guess, the score ordering. And then it would be better still if you could select a template and add/remove instruments all without leaving the wizard. I thought I remembered an existing request for this but the closest I can find is https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/issues/14342.

Anyhow, I think it would be good to think through these issues a bit more.