[MU4 Issue] Ossia issues (cutaway staff)

[SilverGreen93]

Describe the bug There are a number of issues with cutaway staves that should be pointed out. The following examples assume that there is a Piano grand staff and you add an extra staff and make it narrow and cutaway.

1. The barline cannot be different from the main staff.

If I change the barline of an ossia measure to dotted, dash or any kind of barline, the main staff barline changes as well, even though the selected barline/measure is just the upper one. This is annoying as I would like to keep the main barline a solid line, but make only the ossia barline dotted in my case.

2. Adding an ossia staff adds space between all systems in all pages.

If I add just two visible measures on the ossia staff, the whole layout changes to accomodate an invisible staff, although there are only 2 measures visible in only one system. There should be no space added between the systems that do not contain any visible measures in the ossia staff.

2a. Adding an ossia staff in the middle is a more visible issue of (2)

(Just a consequence of 2) The spacing between the two staves of the Grand staff should not change where there is no ossia staff visible.

3. Adding an ossia staff last, keeps the system bracket over the invisible staff.

Although adding the staff first makes the system bracket only cover the reamining 2 staves (which is expected behaviour), adding it as the last staff makes the system bracket go over the invisible ossia staff for no reason.

MU4 demo file ossia.zip

[oktophonie]

1. I would consider a feature request (the ability to have differing barlines on certain staves), which has been requested before and we'll certainly look into.

2. and 2a. can be avoided by ensuring 'Hide empty staves' is checked and that 'Don't hide empty staves in first system' is unchecked. I have no objection to the idea that if all of the bars in a given system are cutaway are not displayed, then that stave should be considered as invisible - except that this would make these bars unselectable, for when you wished to show them. (Extra options are needed for stave hiding to make this workaround more viable, for example, options to exclude staves from being hidden, or to ensure that if one stave of a grand staff instrument is shown, the other must be too, etc; this is in the works.)

3. is possible and will require some investigation.

[MarcSabatella]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but different barlines for different staves is supposed - by adding while holding Ctrl. Same method used for local key and time signatures.

Regarding 2, you can also simply set "Hide when empty" to "Always" in staff/part properties, instead of needing to set hide empty staves for the whole score. Useful if there are other empty staves you don't hidden. Realistically, we could have made the "cutaway" option automatically hide this staff when empty, as there probably are few if any use cases where you wouldn't want this. But I guarantee 10 minutes after someone implements that someone will complain, "hey, I was using that!" :-)

[SilverGreen93]

@MarcSabatella You're right, holding Control while adding the measure barline works. It does the trick and the barline can now be split into different types.

@MarcSabatella, @oktophonie I tried the Hide when empty set to always, but I think that unfortunatelly I found a bug here as well: On the same example as above, if I go into the staff's properties and set Hide when empty to always, immediately after clicking OK, the clefs for the other staves are replaced with either treble & treble (instead of treble & bass) or bass & treble and all my notes are now transposed (depending where the ossia staff was in the stack of staves for the instrument). I think something messes up the clef's index or associations with the staves Note that this also resets the cutaway checkbox and will need to be checked again manually.

Here is the file with the wrong clefs: ossia2.zip

Other than this bug, this is however the way I want it to work. Selecting hide when empty results in no more spacing added between systems.

[Enrico9494]

Hi team, @oktophonie @MarcSabatella - has there been any progress on point 3. raised by the original poster @SilverGreen93 please?

I've tried various options for the system bracket, but none seem to produce the desired effect. I can make it one stave high, but MS chooses the ossia stave and not the main one - and won't allow me to change it.

Many thanks, Eric :-)

[Enrico9494]

I should have said, I'm using MS 4.1.1 Appimage for Linux/Ubuntu 22.04

[sammik]

@Enrico9494 this?

https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/assets/1646034/afc909e3-cdd0-40b9-bd1e-28f7a1dd48c9