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

[Marek Peteraj]

On Tue, 2004-03-16 at 03:27, Paul Davis wrote:
> >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.
> 
> i did too, until i read about a tool called amadeus. it too is a
> cmdline tool. it originally existed for the pdp-11, and was ported to
> many proprietary unix systems over the years. it runs on linux these
> days. 
> 
> it appears that many people don't know about amadeus. its not open
> source, but several custom/boutique music engraving places use it
> (search for "amadeus music engraving" on google). its been around the
> block more than a few times, and my guess is that it already does a
> lot of what lilypond can do, plus quite a few things it can't do yet.
> 
> amadeus doesn't invalidate lilypond, but finding out about it made me
> think again about the level of "revolution" that lilypond's quality
> represents. 

If lilyponds quality matches the quality of amadeus, then lilypond is a
revolution because it's open source. The authors of lilypond pointed out
that lilypond produces better quality outputs than amadeus:
"In terms of default graphical quality LilyPond handily beats both of
them, but that's an unfair comparison. Like Finale, Amadeus and SCORE
are very powerful packages, but they do not mislead users with a
friendly GUI. They are aimed at professionals that need to create
perfect prints in a short time-span."
It might or might not be a biased opinion, but a wide adoption of
certain sw doesn't prove that it's superior in terms of quality.
The fact that they had feedback from few top-notch engravers means a lot
in my opinion.

> lilypond will be invaluable to many individuals who might
> otherwise have to use finale or sibelius, but for people doing music
> typesetting for a living, i have the feeling that they haven't been
> waiting for lilypond at all.

This reminds me of the Mike Mack Smith interview on linuxmusician.com.
The problem with typesetters not waiting for lilypond is the same as
with people not using open source in general.
To quote the interview:
"A: The reason we stick with it, rather than something like Finale or
Sibelius, is that we can customize it to do whatever we want, not what a
programmer has determined in advance that we want!"

"Q: It sounds a bit like Lilypond. Have you ever considered trying to
switch to a free-software alternative like that? Any idea what the pros
and cons might be?"

"A: Well, we believe that Amadeus produces the best quality in the most
efficient way. Music publishers can be very picky about the smallest
aspect of music setting... and so are we. Certain music setting packages
may be great as composing and arranging tools, but do have deficiencies
when it comes to the presentation of the music for print."

and continues...

"A: I haven't had a long look at Lilypond, but my guess is that Amadeus
is more advanced."

The same thing with oss sw in general: " Well i haven't had a look at
oss app X, but my favourite Y app is more advanced."
You'll see people arguing about the broken gimp UI for the same reason
on /. while the last version they have tried was 1.2 2 years ago. 

> 
> >* a GUI would turn Lilypond into a composition tool aswell. Integrating
> 
> sf.net has at least a couple already.

None of them is a true WYSIWYG editor with its tools optimized for
efficiently producing music notation using a mouse or mouse+key driven
UI approach, covering all capabilities of Lilypond. With such GUI being
a part of Lilypond, you would get the best of both worlds, Finale and
Amadeus. 

Marek