Beta
Team-only, for the next 7–10 days. Use Ossia as your real music paper — lessons, practice notes, score markings — and tell us every time it makes you want real paper back.
Install (pick your device)
iPad — the main event
Open ossia.nathanielschool.com in Safari → tap the Share button → Add to Home Screen → open Ossia from the new icon. Full-screen, Apple Pencil pressure/tilt and palm rejection included. Give it one minute online on first launch — it quietly stores itself on the iPad so it opens with no wifi afterwards.
Mac — desktop app
Download Ossia.dmg (notarized by Apple, 178 KB) → open it → drag Ossia to Applications. It's a live window onto the same app, so it updates itself.
Anything else — the web
Just use ossia.nathanielschool.com/studio in Chrome or Safari. Everything you draw is saved on that device.
What to put through its paces
- Draw with finger, mouse, and Apple Pencil — every pen nib. Undo must reverse everything, always.
- Draw a circle / line / slur / hairpin and HOLD still — it should snap to a clean shape. Move again to cancel.
- Add a staff, turn on Staff snap, scribble a small circle on it — it must become a real quarter note on the line.
- Open a PDF score (or the Octavarium sample), annotate, zoom, swipe pages. Try Analyze score → Stamp all.
- Lasso your ink: move, scale, rotate, duplicate, recolor. Insert an image, then Crop it with the edge handles.
- Make a multi-page book, flip pages, then Export: PDF, PNG, ink-only PNG, and the whole book.
- Open Ossia once with wifi ON and use it properly. Then switch on Airplane Mode, close it, and reopen from the Home Screen — it must load and draw exactly the same.
- Try to break it: rotate the iPad mid-stroke, refresh mid-edit, go offline and back. Your work must survive.
Found something? Tell us fast
One line is enough: device + what you did + what went wrong. Screenshots are gold. Send to music@nathanielschool.com or drop it in the team WhatsApp. The killers to flag immediately: strokes landing away from the pen tip, palm marks, lost work after a refresh, lag on a full page — anything that makes you reach for actual paper.
Already known — don't report these
- No sign-in. Accounts and cross-device sync are switched off for this round. Your work lives on the device you drew it on, and stays there.
- No App Store / TestFlight build yet. The iPad version is the Home Screen one above; it behaves the same.
- Pencil pressure over Sidecar.If you mirror the Mac app onto the iPad with Sidecar, strokes come through at one flat weight — macOS doesn't pass Pencil pressure through. Drawing straight into the iPad app is the pressure-sensitive path.
If Ossia ever opens stuck or blank after an update, add ?nosw=1 to the end of the address once — that clears its offline copy and reloads a fresh one.
Nathaniel School of Music · beta build · thank you for breaking it before the world gets to.