20 Aug
2007
20 Aug
'07
7:02 a.m.
On Monday 20 August 2007, tim hall wrote:
David Baron wrote:
To most extent, this is so.
Muscscore (mscore) has all the features necessary and it capable of doing a
very nice score for multistave choral music. No guitar chord symbols and such
"extras" needed here. Note entry to this program is the problem.
Noteedit, as I said, will adequately get the job done. From here, you can go
to lilypond or to mscore.
There was a thread on this a while back, the need
for opensource or
free/minimal cost alternatives to Sibelius and such on Linux.
One can run Finale Notepad or various lower cost upgrades using Wine and
this may be the best alternative if one can get the MIDI and printing
working this way.
For lack of a handy staffbook--and it is easier to simply grab a
staffbook, a extra fine pen and a typex stick--I tried what I have on my
Debian Sid box:
Scoring:
Notedit--KDE's scoring program will get the job done. Most functionality
is there. Chord entry is very awkward and the ui needs more toolbar
items. But it works and will export to most everything needed including
abc which opens the door to many Windows and Linux programs that can
print score, Lilypond, MusicTex and MusicML.
Canorus--successor to Notedit. Too early for this one.
Denemo--GUI for Lilypond. Too early for this one as well. Nice start but
had to go back to Notedit to continue.
Musescore/mscore--new boy on the block. Coming along nicely and will soon
be the best around. Still work to be done, text field editing is
nigh-impossible but this is the alternative to Finale and Sibelius to
watch. Imported MusicML from Noteedit.
MIDI keyboard to any of these is precarious at best.
For printing (engraving when doing music):
Lilypond--works well with its peculiarities. Not enough control of
formatting when exporting from noteedit, et al. Denemo not ready so need
to know its markup language to really use it well. It is supposed to be
the standard.
MusixTex--works nearly as well as Lilypond but does not handle UTF8,
foreign characters out of the box.
Musescore--one when sets the formatting parameters (not defaulted
properly) produces very nice results. Its scoring is WYSIWYG once the
formatting params are set up. Again, the one to watch.
I find this all slightly depressing. I thought Rosegarden / Lilypond
ought to be the tools for the job, but the message I keep hearing is
that they don't come up to the standards required for professionally
printed music. I wish somebody could properly explain why.
I've been commissioned to write a book of choral music, which requires
multivoice staves, so obviously Rosegarden will fail there. I shall have
to let them do the setting in Sibelius unless I can come up with some
solid arguments to the contrary.
It just seems ludicrous to me that we have all this incredible
multimedia software at our disposal, but every time someone wants to
typeset music we have to consider going back to proprietary tools like
Finale / Score / Sibelius. This is terribly disappointing.
Please say it isn't so. ;)