How to hide and show individual tabs programmatically?

I would like to be able to hide and show a tab from the current collection of
visible tabs.

I setup the following plunker

http://plnkr.co/edit/9JMRCBU60gfCxNBLcp3O?p=preview

  <ion-tab [hidden]="Tab2Hide_" [root]="tab2Root" tabTitle="Tab 2" tabIcon="pulse"></ion-tab>
Tab2Hide_ = false;
  Tab2Hide() {
    this.Tab2Hide_ = ! this.Tab2Hide_  ;
  }

“Why do you want to hide a tab?” you might ask. The question is valid in itself, however, in my case
it’s really a kludge around the fact that I was not able to figure how to keep
certain pages, used to contain players, alive throughout a session after being
loaded. A page in a tab seems to stay around so that’s why I am attempting to
work with tabs.

Currently I have 4 tabs used for media selection plus two others to host
player1 and player2, for a total of 6 tabs (I will have more players soon). I
really would like to keep only the 4 tabs used for the media selection. However,
I tried using .push( Player1Page ) and I noticed that the players pages get
re-created every time they are visited.

I also tried to make the players into components

eg. which then could be hosted into a single page and
shown or hidden according to the current playing media.

IMPORTANT: Currently, hosting a player in tab allows the media to continue
playing (A), while the user can still browse the 4 tabs for media selection (in
search perhaps of other contents) but can also return to the current player by selecting the player’s tab (B).

I would like to preserve this functionality (A)(B), even if it means we pop the
player’s page in the foreground, the user should be able to exit the player page,
which should stay live, ie playing a video, slide show, … typically the sound can still be
heard. I would then provide a mechanism like a floating button in the media selection
tabs to return to the current player.

THE REAL QUESTION: how to keep/force certain pages, used to contain
players, alive throughout a session after they are loaded.

NOTE: Please feel free to upgrade the dependencies to the latest builds.
I am not comfortable doing it with the plunker (config.js).

Thank you.