[LAD] Improvisor lilypond support!?

Grammostola Rosea rosea.grammostola at gmail.com
Thu Jun 11 13:50:27 UTC 2009


raymond wrote:
> On Thursday 11 June 2009 08:19:56 Grammostola Rosea wrote:
>   
>> lasconic wrote:
>>     
>>> I took some time yesterday night to take a look to improvisor code and
>>> estimate the cost of adding musicXML export. Import is indeed more
>>> complicated.
>>> I downloaded the code of improvisor 3.39. It's the last and only code
>>> available. Improvisor inner model is a little bit different than musicXML
>>> one. Common practice in musicXML is to don't "time" the chords and put
>>> them in the middle of notes. At least, this is my experience with finale
>>> musicXML export features.
>>> I managed to make a quick and dirty prototype to export a simple melody
>>> (no tuplet) and chord root and bass (no extension yet). Chords are in
>>> between notes but lily+musicML2ly shoud be able to deal with it.
>>> Unfortunately, 3.39 is an old version, and according to Bob Keller the
>>> code base changed a lot but it's not public yet.
>>> With some more voices, perhaps we can convince Bob Keller and his team to
>>> open up the repository to the public. After all, improvisor is a fine
>>> piece of software which can benefit from open development, moreover if
>>> time and resources are an issue.
>>>
>>> Lasconic
>>>       
>> Thanks man. I'll forward this to Bob Keller too.
>> I think he mentioned in a message that he is willing to give developers
>> svn access to the recent code.
>>     
>
> Really. Last year I found Improvisor and wanted to contribute to it, so I got
> in contact with Bob. I made some changes to integrate the application better
> into the desktop (on Mac OS X also) and did some initial cleanup.
>
> The reaction I received was less than welcoming. In fact, the message I got
> was that they were not interested in really allowing outside developers to
> contribute. Thus my changes were never used, or considered as far as I can 
> tell. What I got was a bunch of excuses about the situation with the 
> application until finally this Bob guy came straight out and harshly refused 
> to cooperate on development. I even had to ask numbers of time before I could 
> finally get the source code and this resulted in it finally being posted on 
> the group.
>
> Basically the group that works on it is his student research group at the 
> educational institution he is employed at. So it appears that they just want 
> to keep all the glory and credit for the application to themselves by 
> disallowing outside contributions. This is really not manner that we usually 
> associate with FOSS. The fact that you have to subscribe to a user group
> even to get the binary is one big clue. To my mind the only reason it is under
> GPL is because they use other libraries that are, not because they see some 
> benefit to doing so.
>
> The only way to go with this application, at the moment, is to fork it. I was
> considering doing this a while ago, but have other projects keeping me busy.
> If you can convince them to open it up, great. I wouldn't hold my breath
> though. If enough other developers are interested then I could give some time
> to a fork.
>
>
>   
This is what he replied me

"If there are developers who are serious, I could provide svn access to 
our repository. Right now there are 3 people who are active. We are 
about to release version 4, which is almost a year out from version 3.39 
that is in the user group. "

So I think we have to go the working together way first.
I've forwarded the message of Lasconic to him, let's wait for his reply 
on that.

Kind regards,

\r



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