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

[Chris Cannam]

On Tuesday 16 Mar 2004 2:27 am, Paul Davis wrote:
> it appears that many people don't know about amadeus.

There is a good reason for that: it's totally unavailable to 
practically everyone.  It's an extremely expensive closed-source 
product that as far as I know is no longer even sold.

It is, however, very similar to Lilypond -- more similar than Han-Wen 
indicates in his interview.  I have input and output examples right 
here and I can say that with input pretty much as simple as you give 
to Lilypond it does indeed produce extremely fine output.  (My 
examples came from Mike Mack Smith, who is one of those engravers 
referred to in the Lilypond interview who has his own notation font, 
so it's likely that Amadeus might not look so good straight out of 
the box.)

> for people
> doing music typesetting for a living, i have the feeling that they
> haven't been waiting for lilypond at all.

I think the problem here is just that you seem to have started from 
the assumption that Lilypond was in fact unique, and been 
disappointed when it turned out not to be so.  It is unique in the 
sense that it's the only tool dedicated to making true 
publication-quality engraving available to anyone, but of course it's 
not a new idea as software.  Neither is Ardour, yet you still manage 
to describe that as a revolution on its webpage.


Chris