On 08/04/2011 04:41 AM, Rustom Mody wrote:
On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 2:25 AM, David Baron
<d_baron(a)012.net.il
<mailto:d_baron@012.net.il>> wrote:
My 2 cents:
I use software that does the job. OpenSource is not necessarly
free, just
means one can get the sources and compile it, twiddle the code, if
one so
chooses. Not all musicians can or want to bother with this. One
thing is that
opensource authors are much more accessible and listen to
suggestions. This
has made nted into quite an effective scoring package. Put down
top bucks for
Sibelius, great program but you buy the package, that's it.
I guess I can say that nted has changed my life quite significantly.
I have been a hobbyist pianist and professionally a teacher of
computer science/programing. Suddenly I am a teacher of singing mostly
teaching people who never imagined they could read staff notation.
(Heres an example:
http://vimeo.com/16894001/ of how it works)
So much for the good side.
But of late nted keeps crashing/erroring. My recent questions on the
nted list have gone unanswered. Am I grumbling? Well not really.
Joerg Anders has done a superb job of making nted and like all he must
have a life outside that also. But realistically I would like to
know whether development has died and it would be best for me to cut
my losses (about a hundred hours spent typing in scores) and move to
something else.
On a related note because my ubuntu laptop runs nted it cannot run
pulseaudio. Because it cannot run pulseaudio no other audio works.
If we are talking of the state of linux audio maybe a small mention of
the pulseaudio saga would not be out of place?
I could go on but this is a long enough rant :-)
My main point is that this discussion seems to separate
politics/sociology from technical issues. The reality is in-between:
I am able to do things thanks to linux and free software that I
could/would not otherwise have imagined. But things are very far from
'just working'.
Others may not have such a high 'needs-tweaking' threshold.
Basically NtED was/is the most promising GUI notation editor for me.
Better then MuseScore (faster, lighter imo). But you need more for an
open source project to be successful. One-man-shows (I don't mean that
disrespectful) are, most of the time, less sustainable then projects
which are able to form a nice community of users and developers around
it. MuseScore is doing a excellent job on that point and the project
gives you a lot of features now. The project seems to have a lot of
support from different kind of people, which gives me, as a user, the
confidence that it will useful for me in the coming years. Personally I
rather learn to use a piece of software if the chances are low that is
will stop/die soon...
Regards,
\r