Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?
1–10 of 37 posts
Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?
#2This is well worth reading for any developer once you get past the first page or so. At first the complaints about existing software seem overblown because it's not obvious where the shortcomings are, but once you get into it it's an interesting study in how multiple small flaws can be seriously aggravating to the trained eye...and the dangers of unthinking abstraction that works fine in simple cases but falls apart when applied to more complex problems.
Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?
#3I have only fired up lilypond a couple of times, but I have to say I am very impressed by this open source project. It obviously aims to be best in category.
Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?
#4This is well worth reading for any developer once you get past the first page or so. At first the complaints about existing software seem overblown because it's not obvious where the shortcomings are, but once you get into it it's an interesting study in how multiple small flaws can be seriously aggravating to the trained eye...and the dangers of unthinking abstraction that works fine in simple cases but falls apart…
I can barely see the difference even after the explanation; but it's a beautiful thing to watch perfectionists creating a truly great tool, and making it free. They really are making the world a better place.
Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?
#5It's a shame they won't make the typesetting engine available as a library so that a (real) graphical interface could be written for it.
Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?
#6This is well worth reading for any developer once you get past the first page or so. At first the complaints about existing software seem overblown because it's not obvious where the shortcomings are, but once you get into it it's an interesting study in how multiple small flaws can be seriously aggravating to the trained eye...and the dangers of unthinking abstraction that works fine in simple cases but falls apart…
I'd have liked to have read that far, but the serif on the 'f' was just so overwhelmingly grotesque that I simply couldn't bring myself to do it.
Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?
#7This is well worth reading for any developer once you get past the first page or so. At first the complaints about existing software seem overblown because it's not obvious where the shortcomings are, but once you get into it it's an interesting study in how multiple small flaws can be seriously aggravating to the trained eye...and the dangers of unthinking abstraction that works fine in simple cases but falls apart…
I can barely see the difference even after the explanation; but it's a beautiful thing to watch perfectionists creating a truly great tool, and making it free. They really are making the world a better place.
>I can barely see the difference even after the explanation;
I'm only barely trained at piano - the handmade notation does look better to me, but I couldn't actually tell you why. Indeed my impression of the first close-ups was that they were pretty near identical, yet I couldn't get over the sense that one was richer, fuller. It would have been nice to have a blind study to open on - choose which of these x is the nicest rendered, state your musical training, then tell us why we like what we did.
Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?
#8It's a shame they won't make the typesetting engine available as a library so that a (real) graphical interface could be written for it.
It's open source. Knock yourself out.
Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?
#9It's a shame they won't make the typesetting engine available as a library so that a (real) graphical interface could be written for it.
It's open source. Knock yourself out.
When I looked at doing that many years ago, their attitude was that splitting it into a library was not a useful thing to do and that everybody should be editing text files.
Re: Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation?
#10I've been dying for the inverse of lilypond;an app that would allow you to take a picture and turn it into text notation/MIDI would be awesome.
That said, I used lilypond a couple of years ago and loved it.