[linux-audio-user] [reed: Denemo develop - state of the art]

[stefano cardo]

----- Forwarded message from reed -----

To: matthew.hiller at yale.edu
Subject: Denemo develop - state of the art

Hi Matthew,
		I'm Stefano, an Italian musician and Linux "fanatic" ;-)

Two years ago, trying to find a Linux score editor, I knew Lilypond.
As you say in GOALS
"Well, this is what it is for me: I find it a mite difficult to
compose or arrange with emacs. I mean, Mozart wouldn't have had
a problem with it, but I'm not that talented -- it's very, very
helpful to me if I can actually see the music that I'm developing
as it gets developed."

I'm completely agree with you!!

Again "GUI notation tools are also pretty good for
entering music quickly if you have a midi keyboard; just plunk down
the notes on the midi keyboard with the right hand and enter durations
with the left. (Of course, I don't have a midi keyboard myself, but
from what I understand this feature allows one to enter a part quite
rapidly.)"

With Finale I've never use it, and I did a lot of transcription for Bass
clarinet and Piano...

In DESING you wrote: "You'll notice that denemo doesn't have hooks for
many of Lilypond's features. (In fact, providing hooks for all of them
would be practically impossible without writing something at least as
complicated as Lilypond itself.)"

I don't know anything of write software, I haven't time to study C++,
but I want to consider few things:

- MIDI development is not an HIGH priority of a typesetting editor

You say:" Why is the user forced to do these things manually? Well,
mainly, it
just doesn't seem that there's much advantage to a GUI environment for
putting playing directions directly into the music, fine-tuning the
way the music is beamed, putting multiple independent voices onto the
same staff, adjusting a staff's relative position, and other things
like that. In fact, it seems that there's a distinct disadvantage to
GUIfying these operations: pushing such features to the frontend will
burden the interface and make GUI tool harder to use. (I can say from
personal experience that this has definitely happened to Finale.) It's
just much better to handle this kind of complexity with the precision
and well-defined-ness of plain ASCII text." 

As a musician, write a dotted eight A in the second space, is too different
and difficult to write a'8. (or something like these..
Write a slur or a crescendo mark or other things as having a pen in hand
aren't a disavantage...

pushing such features to the frontend will not burden the interface and
don't make GUI tool harder to use...

"I will admit that this manner of doing things will present challenges
to novice users. Users should find the effort to be worthwhile,
though. And it's not really _that_ difficult to learn how to use GNU
lilypond; it's still easier than, say, learning C plus its gtk+
bindings. :)"

Lot of possible Linux user will remain to their dual boot machine or
with an old laptop with Finale... ;-)

I'm going to translate the .po file into it.po and I'm tring to find
my best keymaprc.. 

In debian sid there is a TOO unstable version... so for me is too
difficult to say "hey there is a bug here!! ".

But I believe very much in your project, believe me!!

Hope to see an your reply soon!!!

Ste

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