[linux-audio-dev] LilyPond interview on linuxmusician.com

[Marek Peteraj]

On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 23:07, Chris Cannam wrote:
> A quick note to say that I've just put together an interview with 
> Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Niewenhuizen, of the LilyPond project, and 
> it's now at http://www.linuxmusician.com/ .
> 
> The interview is pretty long and covers quite a few subjects, and I 
> think is a very interesting read.  I'm very grateful to Han-Wen and 
> Jan for doing almost all of the hard work.

I see Lilypond as one of the top Linux Audio projects.
It addresses the same critical issue for score editing and typesetting
that linux audio applications had to address in order to achieve
low-latency, non-destructive audio editing.

A perfect typesetting engine is an essential part of a score editing and
typesetting package just like a perfect audio engine is an essential
part of an audio editing package. The 'point & click' feature gives a
hint of a complete GUI driven typesetting. The most essential parts of a
future true WYSIWYG GUI driven editing and typesetting are already
supported:

To quote the Lilypond website:

* "Separation of form and content. The music language ensures that
content (the music) and the layout are strictly separated."
* "The input is done in the form of a textual music language."
* "Automated formatting."

I have no idea how the communication between the GUI and the typesetting
engine would be handled but i believe that lilyponds textual music
language is the key, translating it into complete set of GUI tools.
Custom handling of pagebreaks and text setting could be involved instead
of TeX. The future version of cairoized gtk+ would provide a perfect
platform since the cairo engine itself should be hw accelerated where
possible and provide true pdf quality output. 

Honestly i haven't used any of the commercial packages for score editing
such as finale or sibelius, but i assume there would be a rather big
user feedback on the GUI design(see the Finale or NoteEdit thread on
LAU).

The main advantages of a GUI driven Lilypond are in my opinion:
* to provide typesetters with a complete set of editing capabilities
ranging from mouse/key driven GUI editing to text based editing(current
Lilypond).
* a GUI would turn Lilypond into a composition tool aswell. Integrating
it with a sampler such as Linuxsampler would enable to compose scores,
instantly and faithfully 'previewing' the composition you're working on.
The only downside of this is that the orchestral libraries are way too
expensive to most of us i believe. Hopefully this will get better in the
future. However you can get a decent grand piano samplelibs for
reasonable prices these days and there's one A type steinway (and other
instruments) available for free,
http://theremin.music.uiowa.edu/MIS.piano.html  
* thus, it would attract more users and encourage them to learn
notations and write sheet music. 

just my 2c

Marek