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“Compiling” Music

lilypond.org

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Re: “Compiling” Music

#31

Post by tasty_freeze »

jfk13 wrote: post #13
pdpi wrote: post #7

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, 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 is also a musician and music teacher, but I have not been able to persuade her to tackle Lilypond. (I have occasionally done projects in Lilypond for her, and the results are great, but the barrier to entry is too high for her to scale.) What she has found much more approachable is MuseScore ( https://musescore.org/ ). I haven't done a careful comparison of the output to see which scores better [sorry!], but…

Musescore is usable but isn't great. I haven't used lilypond, but I'm sure lilypond is miles better.

The focus of musescore has changed over the past year or two, all triggered by a funny youtube sh*tpost criticizing its UI (it was one series of such videos taking shots at all the big notation programs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A

The guy who created it is a trifecta: a composer, a typographer, and UI expert. The team at musescore took the criticism in good humor, and hired the creator of the video (Tantacrul, aka Martin Keary) to help them change it. The first phase was getting rid of some low-hanging fruit in the UI department. That work is ongoing.

The main focus of the next phase (musescore 4.0) is the quality of the layout. Some of those improvements already landed in musescore 3.6.

Re: “Compiling” Music

#32

Post by dang »

Related:

Lyp – The Lilypond Swiss Army Knife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13259590 - Dec 2016 (7 comments)

LilyBin, an Online Musical Score Editor (using LilyPond) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414004 - April 2015 (1 comment)

Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262 - July 2010 (36 comments)

Open source typesetter for sheet music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192289 - March 2010 (23 comments)

LilyPond architecture (music notation software in Lisp) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379234 - Nov 2008 (2 comments)

Re: “Compiling” Music

#33

Post by bsedlm »

TylerE wrote: post #18
pdpi wrote: post #7

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, 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…

Not quite as true anymore, as Dorico can produce output that is AT LEAST as good.

going way off the rail (but this is a good example for some general thoughs regardings to software in society)

this illustrates two different approaches (goals? paths?) about software in society:

on the one hand: the lilypond way -- the old-school hobbyist open/free source "communist" approach, the path-being-abandonded. In which there's a learning curve but once learned it opens a world of possibilities.

on the other hand: the dorico way -- the commercialist (mercantilist), Microsoft-pionered world of private and commercial software products in which companies work to reduce the learning curve but also end up turning the afore mentioned world of possibilities into a constrained hallway or a boxed easy-to-use shelf of products (an app store) which is also difficult to customize (enter the 'contractors ecosystem' who will do it for you; or app marketplace).

The path we're being dragged into (at least I feel like I'm getting dragged, I prefer the other path but this is a collective decision, so my own individual choice is discarded in the face of the overall social choice)

Re: “Compiling” Music

#34

Post by aidenn0 »

I love lilypond. My son plays the piano now and I make simplified arrangements of songs for him. He can pick out songs by ear and I'm teaching him to hand annotate first, because I don't know a better way to encourage familiarity with the notation, but I'll get him set up with lilypond eventually.

There are various nicer IDEs for it, but I just run side-by-side windows with zathura and emacs; zathura will automatically reload when PDFs change on disk so I can see my changes immediately.

Re: “Compiling” Music

#35

Post by TylerE »

cesaref wrote: post #23
pdpi wrote: post #7

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, 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…

This is fairly trivially handled. All the commercial packages easily allow putting a last modification time stamp on the page footer, or something like that.

Re: “Compiling” Music

#36

Post by tunesmith »

Lilypond is freaking awesome. As a hobbyist with a music degree but unrelated career, I switched a while back, and it's saved me multiple times over just because of backwards compatibility and free software. My old version of Sibelius doesn't run on newer hardware, so some old scores I never ported are lost if I don't spend money just to export. But my old lilypond scores will always be fine.

Re: “Compiling” Music

#37

Post by zozbot234 »

throw0101a wrote: post #27
pdpi wrote: post #7

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, 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?

There are some tools along these lines, but most people simply use Frescobaldi as an integrated editing environment for Lilypond. The most GUI-like tools (including Musescore) are based on MusicXML which is intended as a semantic representation of sheet music, usable for more than typesetting; unfortunately, there isn't good interoperability between Lilypond and MusicXML right now, only some hacked-together attempts at basic import and export.

Re: “Compiling” Music

#39

Post by zozbot234 »

bsedlm wrote: post #33
TylerE wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite as true anymore, as Dorico can produce output that is AT LEAST as good.

going way off the rail (but this is a good example for some general thoughs regardings to software in society) this illustrates two different approaches (goals? paths?) about software in society: on the one hand: the lilypond way -- the old-school hobbyist open/free source "communist" approach, the path-being-abandonded. In which there's a learning curve but once learned it opens a world of possibilities. on the othe…

Tools like Lilypond are not just for hobbyists or non-commercial users; in fact, there's a pretty long history of Lilypond devs getting paid for adding new features to the software, as well as for general support/maintenance work.

Re: “Compiling” Music

#40

Post by klyrs »

HPsquared wrote: post #22
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #2

Anyone 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.

If a compiler comes with musak, will that reduce the complaints about slow compilation speeds?
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