About the ossia

• Jul 15, 2020 - 12:24

Hello,

So i choosed to post in feature request, but i also need some help for a quick fix.
My request basicaly concern the ossia, as it is a paiiiinnnn to add one (and later multiple) ossia(s) in a score, there is a dirty trick to add them (an official tutorial helped me a lot), but anyway you should really try to implement a more reliant way to add them.
Sans titre.png
Here's a screenshot of one ossia, using the dirty "more instrument" trick and hiding/cuting the staff, you can see that by cuting the staff at the start of the line you also cut the mesure numbering, i've tryed many thing to add it back, maybe there is a way to force the numbering to be displayed on my "main" staff instead of on the hidden one (if possible without adding manually some text).

Thanks,

Jean

PS: excuse me for my, maybe, bad english, i'm not a native english speaker.


Comments

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

You add a new staff (ie a new instrument) to the entire sheet to fake the ossia localy, then you cut/hide it wherever it is not needed.
Cutting the staff should remove it, at least localy, but as you can see the main staff doesn't take back the priority for the numbering.
Maybe there's something I'm doing wrong...

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

I added a staff with properties: "hide when empty", unchecked "do not hide if system is empty", checked "smal staff" and "cutaway", then in style>score checked "hide empty staves".
(basicaly what the tutorial tell you to do to fake an ossia)
And it works perfectly, just the mesure numbering at the start of the line where the ossia is displayed (because it actually tries to number on the hiden/cutaway staff) is missing. This is only a detail and i can fix it by adding it manually, but i don't like to fix stuff this way.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

An ossia measure and a small staff are not the same thing. Small staves are indeed played, ossia measures aren't. That's why the one is a staff type and the other one a measure type. That MuseScore can fake an ossia measure with a small staff/hiding empty measures, doesn't mean the feature is directly supported.

In reply to by m.r-botero

It's not because Sibelius chose to implement ossia as a measure thing that the different implementation in MuseScore (which has a different internal structure) is suddenly less valid. An ossia most definitely is also a partial staff, which may or may not be small and may or may not be a measure (it can be less, it can be more).

Currently the cutaway staff is how MuseScore supports ossia. Not as a workaround, but implement exactly for this purpose.

What we would like to add in the future is a more user friendly way to have an ossia automatically linked to a certain range of a different source staff. But the details for how such a feature might work aren't established yet.

In reply to by jeetee

Many things are supported through workarounds. The trace of the workaround can be seen in the "system barline" at the beginning of a new system that keeps appearing in subsequent systems. That's because MuseScore keeps hiding an empty staff that is connected to the instrument that you originally wanted to do the ossia for. A straightforward and reliable way to make an ossia in MuseScore is lacking.

In reply to by m.r-botero

When I take an existing score and take the top staff and turn on the "cutaway" option for it, I don't see those system barlines at all.

I can confirm the measure number disappearing and can confirm that is a bug. Probably other system elements have a similar issue (as they already have with other hidden staves for other reasons). The reason for this is that I recall the feature indeed being added rather hastily into one of the releases.
But having some bugs to a feature doesn't suddenly make the feature a workaround. A workaround would be abusing some other functionality to reach a similar result (like in the old days where you had to manually start hiding measures for such a fake staff).
The "cutaway" option is not a workaround, it is the intended tool for the job.

As already mentioned in my previous answer, we indeed hope to make this more straightforward. But calling the current feature unreliable is simply not true.

In reply to by jeetee

Here is a .gif of the ossia workaround (because of its size, better download and maximize the window). I apologize if my use of the word "workaround" is rather loose. That is at least, from a user perspective, the perception of a function intended for something that doesn't even carry the name of the thing it's supposed to achieve. There are three properties needed for this case: cutaway, small (not mandatory but rare without it), and always hide empty measures. From a user perspective, this is the procedure you would do in a workaround (because I, as a user, don't need a new "full" staff, nor do I need to hide anything from it in the first place) and it makes me think that the new cutaway feature seems to be the "automatic version" of the old workaround (which doesn't make it convincing to me that the feature actually got implemented). Please correct me if I'm wrong :-).

Attachment Size
MuseScore ossia.gif 968.67 KB

In reply to by m.r-botero

Cutaway was very definitely intended for ossia usage: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/2150 (part 3 of the initial comment) so yes the feature got implemented.
Are there still bugs related to it? Probably.
Can it be improved? Yes.

Will it be improved? Yes.
The MuseScore 4 codebase already contains a reference for an improved Ossia element (which as mentioned before, should be more user friendly and auto-linking to the source) right here: https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/blob/c9f8a138529c15bf9d096e53a4a…

Will it internally still be a full staff? Likely, but that will be less obvious to the end user as part of the improved usability.
Should the end user care that it is internally still a full staff? No

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

@jojo... Doesn't work... it's too complicated as well. I assume you mean "staff properties" instead of measure properties. So I did as you said... right-click into a measure, STAFF properties, checked the box for cutaway, and pressed "OK". Nothing happened.

lf there is, indeed, an easy way to create say a one bar ossia, please explain here without pasting a link that is extremely difficult to follow. I'd love that it were as simple as you say.

In reply to by MDiNuovo

Which staff did you right-click? Don't do this for the staff with the normal notation, do this for the separate ossia staff you add. That staff should be mostly empty except for the measures you want to have ossia. Then the cutaway and always hide when empty options will ensure it only shows where necessary.

If you continue to have trouble, please attach your score and describe specifically what is going wrong.

Concerning the missing measure number: maybe format->style->measure numbers "all staves" works in your example as workaround.

In reply to by kuwitt

It will add the numbering at the begining of all mesures in a system, this is awful ^^
About the long discussion you guys had, i'm quite ok with the fact that the way you handle the ossia at the moment is really dirty, not intuitive at all, and futhermore is just not conceptualy in accord with the ossia idea

In reply to by cleanhex

For the other staves rightclick on the measure numbers->select->all similar elements in the same staff and select them invisible.

As mentioned the disappearing measure number seems to be a bug or missing feature, best way is to report it in the issue tracker.

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