----- Forwarded message from reed ----- To: matthew.hiller(a)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 ----- End forwarded message -----