11 Mar
2004
11 Mar
'04
6:04 p.m.
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.
Chris
15 Mar
15 Mar
9:48 p.m.
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
10:33 p.m.
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. 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.
* a GUI would turn Lilypond into a composition tool
aswell. Integrating
sf.net has at least a couple already.
--p
16 Mar
16 Mar
3:20 a.m.
On Tue, 2004-03-16 at 03:27, Paul Davis wrote:
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.
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
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. 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.
5:02 a.m.
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
10:03 a.m.
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. 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.
indeed, a very fine and appropriately back-atcha comparison. lilypond
is certainly just as revolutionary as any of the other tools under
development by anyone else here on this list, and for all the same
reasons.
i think i gave the impression that lilypond bores me or something,
when the truth is quite the contrary. i think its an incredible
program, and it produces wonderful, wonderful output. when i read an
interview about it last year, i was raving to several friends of mine
about its potential (we have neighbours who work in the music
publishing industry).
you are right - i was a little disappointed to find that there was
another program that has been around for many years that embodies the
same kind of design philosophy as lilypond - its hard to think of
other examples like this, where the proprietary-but-ancient tool is
the better tool. for text typesetting, TeX was the gold standard that
proprietary software has still barely matched. here it seems we have a
case where, just as with ardour and other DAW/sequencer tools, the
gold standard is a proprietary program (or some combination of them),
and open source is on the threshold of offering the same kind of
quality and functionality to everyone.
so to reiterate, i love lilypond, i think its great and amadeus is not
really a viable alternative to it for all the reasons that have been
mentioned (cost, lack of availability, etc. etc.)
--p
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participants (3)
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Marek Peteraj -
Paul Davis