Colored passage outlines and a focused practice view

[jmob1988]

I am a private music instructor who uses MuseScore extensively in my teaching and practice. I would like a way to organize the musical phrases I ask my students to practice: outline several passages at once, add short notes about what we are working on, and color-code the passage brackets to show each passage's stage of practice. This would let us see the overall practice landscape while bringing the passage we are currently practicing into a comfortable reading view.

This would also support research using a coded classification system of practice stages. The proposed MuseScore feature would provide the outlines, labels and view focusing; supporting tools would manage the classification system and retain practice notes and history.

Could we add a supported way to outline musical passages and bring a chosen passage into a comfortable reading view?

I am seeking feedback on the usefulness and technical direction of this idea before deciding whether to pursue a prototype.

Proposed feature:

---

A supported plugin API could let teaching, rehearsal and score-analysis tools:

• Display several colored passage outlines at once, with transparent interiors that leave the notation readable.
• Add short plain-text labels for practice instructions or analysis.
• Distinguish the passage currently being practiced from the other marked passages.
• Optionally zoom and move the view to frame one or more chosen passages, without changing the score's layout.

These would be temporary on-screen annotations, separate from native selection. They would not edit the score, add undo steps, change global preferences or appear in ordinary printing and export. Normal score editing would remain available. Updating an outline or its color would not move the view; focusing would be a separate, explicit action. If the requested passages could not all fit at a readable size, the operation would report that limitation rather than silently produce an unreadably small view.

Persistent practice records and teaching classifications would remain the responsibility of the supporting tool. Saving a shareable study-score snapshot could use ordinary score annotations as a separate workflow; this proposal does not request a new persistent score format.

Possible technical approach:

---

A plugin would provide musical start/end positions, the relevant staves, a border style and a label. MuseScore would calculate the outline positions and draw separate fragments where a passage crosses systems or pages. Ranges should support partial measures, rests and the exact end of the score, without silently expanding to whole measures.

Each plugin invocation would own its annotation layer. Updates would replace that layer's set of outlines together, without affecting another plugin's markings. Requests would be bound to a specific score, part and view, so an outdated request could not mark a newly opened score. Outlines would follow zoom and layout changes, be invalidated when score edits make their targets stale, and be cleared when their owning session ends or its bound score/part changes. The feature itself would add no network connection or listener.

Preliminary source inspection at MuseScore commit 6baa012 suggests useful foundations in range geometry and transient view painting, but does not establish a complete supported plugin facility. Accurate coverage of notation such as lyrics, articulations and objects spanning passage boundaries needs further investigation. Plugin lifetime and layout-change handling also need explicit review. If suitable existing facilities can be supported and documented, that may be preferable to adding another rendering path.

Questions for maintainers:

---

1. Would this be useful and fit MuseScore's direction?
2. Would you prefer MuseScore to calculate and draw the outlines, or expose supported geometry and drawing facilities to plugins? Which API/module would be appropriate?
3. Would a small initial prototype with explicit limitations be a useful starting point? How should outlines handle objects crossing passage boundaries, hidden staves and multimeasure rests?
4. Should passage focusing be discussed separately from passage annotations?

If there is interest, I may explore a small isolated prototype with tests and a generic example plugin. An initial test could cover two labeled piano passages, partial measures, rests, ledger lines and system/page breaks, alongside cleanup, editing, undo and score-switch behavior. Overlap and more complex notation would need further testing; unsupported cases should be reported clearly rather than drawn misleadingly.

No implementation is being submitted at this stage, and I am not committing to a delivery schedule or maintaining a separate MuseScore distribution. The aim is a generally useful capability that could be considered for official MuseScore.