Chemabazan I know exactly the problem you are dealing with and have to manage the same in my band's lyric sheets where I also use timestamps.
I achieve the same either with non-lyric comments/notes in my lyric sheet that get highlighted with timestamps, or the better way I found for us is to use an Audio Cues track. This track is just audio cues that we feed into our IEMs for song count ins (e.g. All in on One. 1 2 3 AND) or for reminders on weird timing in the middle of a song (e.g. a 3 bar hang we would just have a '1 2 3 AND' to count us back in).
I don't think what you're asking for is possible as ST isn't a DAW, so all it knows is:
- current time since start of song
- tempo
- time stamps on lyric sheet
Without being a DAW which has bar and measure counts, ST would at best have to calculate time between 2 timestamps then factor in tempo.... or have a timestamp and tempo and be able to calculate the time value for 1/4 notes.. but then do what?
I guess it could conceivably then create a 'countdown gauge' (like a file copy horizontal gauge) on screen.
@peter this is a bit of an 'out there' type question/request, but would it even be possible to have a graphical object that could be called from a lyric sheet? E.g. a visual count down/up or a horizontal thermometer type gauge?
Then if there was a tag with a timestamp, a note value, and the song tempo has been set, a visual object could be produced on screen.
E.g. A song has tempo set to 120bpm, and the lyric sheet has a tag:
[00:01.25]{object:countdown,4,1/4}
which produces a countdown from 4 on quarternotes
For the object class, there could be different object types, cound down, count up, gauge, etc.
The 2nd parameter lets people decide count down/up from/to. Different values accomodate different length of count, time signatures, etc.
The 3rd parameter defines the interval, e.g. 1=whole note, 1/2 half-note, etc.
The old problem of knowing whether tempo is just left at default of 120bpm or intentionally set to a value does reappear, but again, that just involves having a way of recording whether the tempo is at the song default of 120 (maybe change the default to 0 to solve easier?) or has been intentionally set to a value.
I know this type of request for visual count ins has come up in the past, so this could possibly also satisfy that type of scenario.
Anyway, pretty out there request, but it does come up often enough and the above may be a way to solve in an extensible way.