This is a problem I've seen mentioned on this forum a few times, but I'm not completely sure whether it's been "solved" by this point. I tired searching for a few times, but the results didn't quite seem to match my issue. I'm just going to paste in a quote from 12 odd years ago. I have the exact same query.
Thanks in advance to anyone who answers!
If you know how many measures you need, you can insert a single Multimeasure Rest (MMR) and indicate how many measures you want it to span. If you don't get the number exactly right, you can edit the properties to increase or decrease the number of measures.
Well, that might be helpful in some cases, but with orchestras using 20+ staves, each active during different combinations of measures, setting them up would end up being more work, I think. Plus, I'd need to go back and change their values if/when I want to add anything to those parts of the staves afterwards.
I guess there isn't a tool that can automatically generate whole rest measures up until the last measure?
There's at least this tool (https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=9760.0) ("Extend staff below with rests to cursor") I wrote somewhen. Don't know whether it does what you want - and I didn't do any updates since then
... I have just uploaded a version 0.2 which has been lying around on my computer, which does insert whole rests; however, as far as I can see, it will always count them as 4 beats. And the inserted rests are invisible (the original purpose for this tool is to help you compose, where you want to write snippets "later in the score", beforegoing back to an earlier position) - but you easily mark them and then make them visible, of course; which is also simple for many staves, as NWC keeps the selection when going to the next staff with PgDn.
... and I just found that the tool does the following: If you already have a staff of any time signature filled with full rests, and you invoke the tool, it will produce nice full rests on the staff below; this is actually a bug - but might be helpful in your case.
But the tool could be extended in various ways to make it more versatile ...
H.M.
And this is one I wrote 6 years ago: ExtendStaff (https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=8905)
I have a pair of tools that may help NWC Tools (https://wjporter.com/nwc/home.php).
- Resting Staff takes a staff you have copied from another part and turns them into whole measure rests.
- Multi Measure Rests converts a string of whole measure rests into an MMR or backs it out.
The MMR tool also has the options of hiding the rests and boundary collapse.
So now,
@RebeccaETripp , we expect a comparative study about the highs and lows of all these apparatuses, with attached ranking lists for all features that are there and that are missing and ... ;D
I like to win ;D , so I wrote a new tool: AddRestMeasures.og (https://forum.noteworthycomposer.com/?topic=10010.new#info_71733)
Thanks! I'll check it out!
I promise to be as brutal as possible.