I'm happy to be reminded that Lilypond is still around. I used it to produce scores (and MIDIs) 15+ years ago, because it offered the same experience as LaTeX -- beautiful results if you're willing to code and, occasionally, battle eldritch horrors beneath its surface. Like (La)TeX and Emacs, I hope it becomes one of those rare pieces of software that lasts longer than a human lifetime. Few things we build these days, not just software, endure so long.
“Compiling” Music
21–30 of 45 posts
Re: “Compiling” Music
#22Anyone else disappointed this is not about music meant to be played while compiling code ?
That, or music produced by a compiler to indicate its status.
Re: “Compiling” Music
#23As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs. My ex-wife is a musician and a music teacher, and (especially for her teaching job) ends up writing a fair bit of sheet…
My wife writes choral music with Sibelius.
One of the problems she has is versioning, and it's pretty obvious that something like LilyPond + source control would be a massive benefit to her for managing the creative process, as pieces are rehearsed and modified/corrected it turns into a versioning problem with various performers unsure which copy of the piece they are working from.
I should really look into this, especially what printing support looks like (she typically prints double sided on A3 so that it folds correctly into a music folder), and what support for playback looks like.
It's a pretty cool project, I really have been meaning to investigate it, so maybe it's time to pull down a copy and kick the tyres.
Re: “Compiling” Music
#24As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs. My ex-wife is a musician and a music teacher, and (especially for her teaching job) ends up writing a fair bit of sheet…
> As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors
tldr; Lilypond needs to compile a perfect engraving. If it does then you get a great looking score for the least effort. If it doesn't then you'll likely eat all your time tweaking. This makes it good for single instrument parts, not so good for more complex scores.
It's at least an order of magnitude more difficult to tweak anything in Lilypond than it is with a WYSIWYG editor.
Moreover, with WYSIWYG you can take a 30 minute class offered by an expert who will show you how to change the defaults to get a decent-looking score. Even moreover, that expert could literally sit in front of your laptop and drag an indication to a better spot to teach you something about whitespace/alignment/etc.
If you can figure out how to make a small tweak to a Lilypond score in less than 10 minutes you're doing well. And you'll probably have to recompile at least twice since you'll estimate the distance of the tweak wrong, especially if you're a new user. For each tweak.
Oh, and recompilation time scales with score length. Good luck changing the position of an indication in the last bar right before a deadline. I think I'd rather track down an XHTML error in a tax form than do that.
Re: “Compiling” Music
#25Anyone else disappointed this is not about music meant to be played while compiling code ?
Check out toplab.org for all things music-livecoding related.
Tidalcycles which is haskellnased
is one of the favorites of the scene but there are many options.
Or one of the reccomendations in the thread here (esp. supercollider which is lisp based or c-sound for max renderingperformance stuff)
Re: “Compiling” Music
#26Lilypond also has a guile API, and if you are not interested in the actual notation generation or at least how it looks, it can make some pretty weird and cool midi files. You can turn it into a kind of makeshift lisp Supercollider pattern generator.
That is really cool, I had a ton of fun playing with Overtone a few years ago (Clojure Supercollider wrapper).
There's also Impromptu, which I think is Scheme... There's an incredibly cool talk by Andrew Sorensen using it: https://youtu.be/yY1FSsUV-8c
Re: “Compiling” Music
#27As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs. My ex-wife is a musician and a music teacher, and (especially for her teaching job) ends up writing a fair bit of sheet…
Is there a LyX-like tool for music: enter data in a GUI, but a 'code' file is saved and output is generated in the background?
Re: “Compiling” Music
#28More like compiling music notation, even though this is the original title.
Re: “Compiling” Music
#29As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs. My ex-wife is a musician and a music teacher, and (especially for her teaching job) ends up writing a fair bit of sheet…
Is there a LyX-like tool for music: enter data in a GUI, but a 'code' file is saved and output is generated in the background?
I haven't seriously tried any of them, but have a look a the list at:
http://lilypond.org/easier-editing.html
Maybe Denemo: http://denemo.org/
Re: “Compiling” Music
#30As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs. My ex-wife is a musician and a music teacher, and (especially for her teaching job) ends up writing a fair bit of sheet…
My wife writes choral music with Sibelius. One of the problems she has is versioning, and it's pretty obvious that something like LilyPond + source control would be a massive benefit to her for managing the creative process, as pieces are rehearsed and modified/corrected it turns into a versioning problem with various performers unsure which copy of the piece they are working from. I should really look into this, esp…
Minimally you can look at the pdf tools / toolkit and "imposition".
Basically, Lilypond has like a zillion different output formats and page sizes:
https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/paper-...
...then you can take one or more *.pdf as a linear set of sheets and run it through some imposition (booklet) tooling.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/465271/gluing-imposition...
https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
https://pypi.org/project/pdfimpose/
It wouldn't be terribly hard to whip up a Makefile and/or a few shell scripts which would "do the right thing" 99.9% of the time.
eg:
build.sh => make && xdg-open ./output.pdf
commit.sh => git add -u * && git commit -m '$DATE' && git push origin
add-new-files.sh => git add * && git commit -m '$DATE - new files' && git push origin || notify-send "HEELLLPP!"
booklet.sh => make && pdfimpose $OPTIONS ./output.pdf -o booklet.pdf && xdg-open ./booklet.pdf
Good Luck, Have Fun! :-)