[linux-audio-user] Rosegarden vs. Note Edit

[Chris Cannam]

On Friday 13 Jun 2003 5:44 pm, Bearcat M. Sandor wrote:
> What makes one better than the other?  I'm trying to figure out
> which one to install.

As a Rosegarden-4 developer, not only am I not impartial but also I'm 
not a typical Rosegarden user and am not really a NoteEdit user at 
all.  So obviously I can't give you a user's perspective, but that's 
not going to stop me!  At least I can describe some of the intended 
differences between the two, assuming you principally want to enter 
and edit music as score.

The big obvious difference is that NoteEdit is intended to be purely a 
score editor, while Rosegarden-4 is rather grandly intended to be 
some kind of composition and performance tool, which basically means 
a MIDI/audio sequencer that does score editing.

This means that NoteEdit supports quite a bit more score notation than 
Rosegarden and makes a lot of it easier to use, but includes 
play/record facilities only so far as they are directly helpful in 
editing score, and sometimes makes them a bit obscure -- for example, 
the first time I looked at it I never got as far as discovering that 
it could import MIDI files, as that feature was not on the File menu 
but instead on a menu obscurely labelled "TSE3" (the name of the MIDI 
engine it uses).

Meanwhile, the implementation of some notation features in 
Rosegarden-4 has been slowed by the problem of having to make them 
editable and playable in formats other than notation and the fact 
that the developers have to work on all sorts of stuff besides score.  
(I say that with some bitterness, having wasted quite a bit of good 
notation-coding time on tedious MIDI-device stuff recently.)  For 
example it can't even draw repeats on your barlines yet, let alone 
segnos and first/second variations; the implementation of grace notes 
is still very rudimentary; and nobody's got around to implementing 
things like guitar tab yet.  On the other hand, it includes handy 
non-notation things like a matrix (pianoroll) editor, and can do cool 
stuff like recording MIDI and then quantizing it only for the 
notation editor without losing the original performance timings.  And 
it still does a reasonable amount of notation (including n-tuplets, 
nonstandard noteheads etc).

Both of them allow you to enter notes with the mouse, PC keyboard, or 
MIDI keyboard.

NoteEdit employs the paradigm in which it comes up with a blank score 
at the start and you just keep inserting notes, and it starts a new 
bar whenever it needs to (which is one reason why I think it may be 
modelled on NoteWorthy Composer -- although I suppose it could be 
modelled on Rosegarden-2.1).  Rosegarden-4 expects you to define and 
resize your staffs on an overview editor (in a sequencer style) and 
stops you entering stuff into the notation editor when you reach the 
end of a staff.

Both allow changes of time sig, key sig, clef etc and support the 
usual accidentals.

Both allow you to see and edit several staffs at once.

Both can turn your dynamics into MIDI velocities, make tempo changes 
during playback to match those in the composition, and so on.

Both do "proper" notation layout, in the sense that they don't just 
stick the notes at positions proportional to their times and end up 
with a complete mess as some sequencers do (MusE and Brahms for 
example, if I remember correctly).

Neither of them does it as well as Sibelius or Finale.

Both can export MIDI and Lilypond files; NoteEdit can also export to 
ABC, PMX and MusiXTeX, while Rosegarden can export Csound scorefiles, 
MusicXML and Mup.  (NoteEdit perhaps doesn't need to have Mup export 
as its native file format is based on Mup anyway.)  Rosegarden can 
also print score direct from the application, though the results are 
currently so bad you probably wouldn't want to.

Rosegarden is generally flashier -- antialiased notes, optional 
textured backgrounds, nattier key signature and clef dialogs etc. 
NoteEdit has (IMHO) some rather clunky menu and dialog layout: the 
most painful bit of GUI (the use of the middle mouse button to insert 
notes) has been fixed in the 2.1.x/2.2.x releases, but I can still 
never work out how to do simple stuff like play from the somewhere in 
the middle of the piece, while Rosegarden has a nice transport window 
with all that kind of stuff in it, and can do things like playing a 
selected region in a loop while you edit it.

NoteEdit has rather more complete help than Rosegarden, which of 
course makes inexcusable that I don't know how to do basic stuff like 
the foregoing with it.  Rosegarden does have help, and the help for 
notation isn't too bad, but it's not as finished.

NoteEdit's GUI comes in English, German, Italian, Slovak and Swedish; 
Rosegarden's in English, German, Spanish, Russian and Welsh.

Both of them can still be annoyingly flaky at times.  SuSE 8.2, which 
is my preferred distro in most other ways, includes a version of 
NoteEdit that crashes on startup if you have no MIDI devices and a 
version of Rosegarden that can't play in the right time (though I 
suspect that's SuSE's fault for building it with a buggy compiler).  
And in the course of quickly researching this email I imported a few 
MIDI files into the latest versions of both and tried displaying and 
printing them via Lilypond; Rosegarden generally did a better job of 
on-screen display (it looks nicer, and one of the files apparently 
hung NoteEdit) but they actually both failed to produce Lilypond 
output that Lilypond could immediately use: Rosegarden output an 
unparseable hairpin, NoteEdit provoked a weird "Dimension too large" 
error from LaTeX.  (Joerg/Jan, I can send you details of the NoteEdit 
problems if you like.)  Of course that's no test of editing.

Rosegarden has a more obvious community about it, with active mailing 
lists, bug trackers, apparently a greater number of casual 
contributors.  NoteEdit appears to be developed by a smaller number 
of people with no dedicated mailing list etc.  I'm not sure that 
really makes any difference though.  Both are actively worked on, 
have been for some time, and probably will be for some time more.

And that's about all that comes to mind.

Hey, I rather enjoyed that.  I wouldn't mind seeing a reply from one 
of the NoteEdit developers, as I've probably inadvertantly slandered 
them somewhere.


Chris