31–37 of 37 posts
I find it interesting they refer to notes as quarter values or eighths. I can quickly see myself getting confused by that (is that a quaver? Did I do it right?) - does it change if you change the time signature from 4/4 to 3/4? (forgive the slashes)
This 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.
I find it interesting they refer to notes as quarter values or eighths. I can quickly see myself getting confused by that (is that a quaver? Did I do it right?) - does it change if you change the time signature from 4/4 to 3/4? (forgive the slashes)
Meh, I was writing out scores for a band; when I started using Finale the musicians thanked me profusely for making it readable. Unless you can afford your own personal copyist, it's sort of irrelevant. The little formatting nits you learn to work around (or just talk the musicians through it with pencils, which you end up doing anyway for musical reasons)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Another problem is that lilypond is slow, and any WYSIWYG interface to it would either bypass the compiler to show a "preview" of the score or would have a horrible lag whenever the user edited something. This might not be obvious, but adding or removing (or even changing the pitch/duration of) a single note can potentially lead to a solution with completely different appearance (after all it's a dynamic programming…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really wish I could just pipe finale files to it and have lilypond make it not suck.
why is this not possible? Have the program read the "notes" from the finale file, format them into the lillypad format, and have its compiler spit the beautified version back out to you. This would be the equivilent of building a "quick preview gui" for lillypad.
http://www.robertames.com/blog.cgi/entries/nexus-of-etude.ht...
http://www.robertames.com/files/nexus-of-etude/etude.ly
My mistake that I realize now is that I should have used a concept of "voices" to strictly separate the melody from the bass-line.
See here as a contrast from somebody who is muuuuch better at lilypond than me and didn't start with a gui frontend.
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ftp/GiulianiM/O1/Etude4/Etude4...
Relevant section is:
\score { { > >> }
Compared to my amateur:
\score { >
...so the stream of notes is ~lossy~ compared to musically knowing that you're layering a repeating melody on top of a bass-line, or occasionally punctuating a melody with chords.
I find it interesting they refer to notes as quarter values or eighths. I can quickly see myself getting confused by that (is that a quaver? Did I do it right?) - does it change if you change the time signature from 4/4 to 3/4? (forgive the slashes)
"Quarter note," "eighth note" etc. are the standard terms in US English. What you call a quaver, we call an eighth note, regardless of time signature. (4/4 time means there are 4 quarter notes in a measure; 3/4 means there are 3 quarter notes.)