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Linuxmusician.com Interviews LilyPond Authors
jcn writes "Chris Cannam talks to
the authors of
one of the best-known and most ambitious music programs for Linux, the LilyPond score engraving system. Unlike other typesetting software like Finale or Sibelius, LilyPond is not a score editor, it aims to use simple textual description of the music and turn it into the highest possible quality output, automatically.
Han-Wen says: In my opinion, any file format that claims to be universal should have two properties: it should have an expressive structure, so other formats can be expressed in it, and it should be as lean as possible, so that converting from other formats amounts to removing information. I think that MusicXML fits neither. Ouch."
Um, its a music typesetting program, not a sequencer. I am sure it would be fairly easy to convert from a MIDI file to LilyPond, so use a sequencer to get the music into the computer properly, and clean it up in the sequencer, then convert to LilyPond to print it out nice and pretty.
/usr/games/fortune
This is not for reproducing sound. It is a music typesetting program. Like TeX, but for music.
/usr/games/fortune
While I'm not completely familiar with Lilypond, from what I understand it's not trying to be the full, end-to-end solution for music typesetting. It's trying to solve the problem of how you can easily represent musical notation in a textual format and get it to print out into a format as close to human engraving as possible. In otherwords, think of it as TeX for music.
Just as there are GUI frontends for TeX (LyX, for instance), it's completely possible to write a GUI frontend for Lilypond. There are already several projects that might fit the bill on Freshmeat, and I'd be willing to bet that there are several more over at SourceForge (whether or not any of them actually make it past the pre-alpha stage is anybody's guess).
You might want to look here: Linux-sound.org
/usr/games/fortune
NoteEdit purports to export to Lilypond format.
Why is it that so many Unix/Linux programs (and everything else, for that matter) do not provide simple screenshots on their products websites?
Well, here's what appears to be a screenshot of LilyPond in use.
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Planet CCRMA http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software /
The AGNULA Project
http://www.agnula.org/
Enough toys to keep you busy for a day or two.
Denemo
Intellectuals! Liberals! Peacemongers! IDIOTS!!!
Analogy time.
Finale is to Lilypond
as Microsoft Office is to LaTeX.
Seriously, though. Lilypond is an engine.
There are front-ends being developed for it,
like Denemo. They're focus isn't being user-friendly,
it's being effective.
Personally, I've used it.
It rules.
My composer friends want me to re-render
their scores in it.
Chris Cannam, the interviewer in the article, is one of the principal authors of Rosegarden, a free sequencer and music notation editor that runs on Linux. It can output to both Lilypond and MusicXML, among other formats.
Try zooming in. They only look jagged in Acrobat when it is zoomed out. Did you try printing it? I am sure they are perfectly smooth in the printout. I have printed things produced by LilyPond, and they look beautiful. Nothing is jagged.
/usr/games/fortune
Obviously you didn't bother to read past the first of these FAQs, which is a bit sad. It's exactly as if you said "Why bother using TeX when I can typeset mathematics in Word?"
Well, you can. But no journal will accept your output, because the quality just isn't up to snuff. Likewise, Finale's output is not up to the time-honored standards of music publishing. To musicians who sight-read at a professional level, the difference matters. In the long run, they can't stand it any more than Knuth could stand the piss-poor, headache-inducing math typesetting that enraged him into writing TeX. Quote:
Plus, proprietary programs lock your scores into proprietary formats, which you can't further process and share like this (scroll down the page).Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Analogous to the world of word processing, this software is more in the category of software like TeX, LaTeX, or even Postscript and PDF, to a lesser extent. This is software made for pretty printing music. It is meant to do this job, and this job alone very, very well. While one could edit it directly (it's not that difficult to work with), that would be something like using a flathead screwdriver on a screw that is clearly a Philips.
What people should do is look for a score editor that can export LilyPond documents. I'll help start you off:
I'm sure there are others out there.
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
You can see their howto pages to see it in action. You probably want to check out some sample outputs. And this project also uses LilyPond. Check that out.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
I have a lot of music that's hard to read, or scribbled on some paper, or whatever. Transcribing music into the computer is so much easier with Lilypond that with WYSIWYG programs! My hands stay on the keyboard, I look at the music and type
On a WYSIWYG system, think about all the mousing and clicking to select and place key and time signatures, metronome marking, three different note durations, a crescendo, a slur, and dynamics. (The percent sign introduces a comment.) Placing an accent on a note? That's just a character. Repeats? That's one word volta. And so on.Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Admittedly, they don't have a link called Screenshots on their main page, but in two clicks you can get to this page, which leads you on a complete tour of the program, including a page of screenshots.
While the printed output is asthetically pleasing, it strikes me as an odd technology to persue, because I wonder how many musicians today can actually read music. I'd wager the vast majority of rock musicians can't, and that roughly half of pop musicans can't. I can't, and I've written "plenty" of material and play several instruments.
Thanks to strong middle and high school music programs, more people can read music today than ever before.
Reading music is still simply the fastest way for an experienced musician to learn a new piece of music. Many jazz and classical musicians (including myself) can sightread (play it while reading it for the first time) quite complicated pieces of music, up to tempo, which is an extremely valuable skill.
Of course there are a small minority of successful recording artists who can't read music, but the vast majority of successful musicians do read music, and most of them read music well. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
There are a number of projects that strive for this, none is as polished yet, though. Check http://www.linuxsound.at for a comprehensive list of music applications in the Linux arena.
The ones that are closest in functionality, usage and completeness are probably:
- MusE
- Rosegarden-4
Lilypond not only has screenshots, but a very comprehensive tour. Well, these aren't really screenshots, but rather the final output - it's a command-line program, after all. They do have some interesting examples with proper screenshots, too.
The equivalent to ASIO in linux is Jack, but comparing Jack to ASIO is to downplay it's functionality. Jack offers much more and is rapidly becoming the wheel around which all Linux-Audio apps revolve.
There are a number of audio production suites in development in Linux-land.
Some notable ones:
- Ardour, audio only, but pretty much feature complete in that arena.
- MusE a pretty advanced all in one (midi and audio) music production environment.
- Rosegarden-4 which has roughly the same feature set and goal as MusE.
excellent output quality, lilypond has a couple of advantages that
haven't been mentioned in the discussion so far:
Yes, it was a fair bit of work to set it all up (I even use m4 which may not be everyones cup of tea) But after that, producing a new piece of sheet music is really much faster and easier than with the traditional notation packages, and the result is a lot better.
The documentation has sample outputs for each thing as it's being explained.
If you want to be pedantic about it, they do have a screenshot:If you want a screenshot of a GUI, you need to look at a program that has a GUI, such as this frontend to LilyPond.
I'm not sure about that. I sing in a choir in my spare time, and we have a collection of sheet music scrawled by previous conductors which is barely readable (it's hard enough to read to prevent people from being able to sight-sing it, for example). I occasionally typeset these using LilyPond. I am by no means a professional engraver, and it only took a couple of hours to learn LilyPond (less time than it took to learn LaTeX, for example. In fact, LilyPond was the thing that convinced me that learning LaTeX was worth doing).
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Here's the introduction:
(Emphasis mine.)ABC is an extremely popular format for collecting and exchanging tunes. There are Large Tune Repositories and Tune Search Engines using ABC.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Congrats to lily's developers for all their hard work.
I just stumbled across this online music composition generator.I wonder Jan and Han-Wen are aware? Looks interesting for quick and dirty snippets, perhaps great for a beginner's music comp class. It also appears that GUIDO has a more "natural" TeX-like command set, things like \slur, \staccato. But judging by the examples, I think lily is a bit more versatile, in the end.
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My wife, a singer, had little trouble learning to use Lilypond, and she likes it. She's not a programmer and she's not done much (if any) music engraving before.
This was modded insightful?
While I know that this is more of a compositing program--at least from what I read so far...as I have shamefully not RTFA
Obviously. If you had, you'd know that it's not intended to be used for composition.
I'm going to take this opportunity to bitch about the one thing that has been keeping me from making the switch to Linux for all these years: Audio Apps
I have no idea what your requirements are. I don't know when you last looked at the Linux music scene. To me, it seems like the pro audio applications available are progressing at a fantastic rate. But without knowing your needs, I don't know whether it's good enough for you.
I'm no industry elitist that demands ProTools. in fact, I hate protools. The interface leaves much to be desires...granted, i'll buffer that (admittedly harsh) opinion: I'm a huge fan of CoolEditPro.....("eww, PC audio"...I can hear it already),
The hot app for professional multitrack audio recording and editing in Linux is Ardour. But if you don't like ProTools, you may not like Ardour, since its interface is very derivative of ProTools.
The underlying audio subsystems are a far cry from what windows offers. And what I experienced with in my limiting dealings with aRTS leaves much to be desired. (Think: latency) And I'm sure that has a lot to do with it....(why hasn't ASIO or an equiv been implemented yet?)
I don't know any Linux audio folks using aRts for their pro-audio work. Instead, the fundamental infrastructure for pro-audio on Linux these days is JACK. JACK is good stuff, designed from the ground up for professional audio work.
Other people have given you info to look at about specific pro-audio applications: Ardour, JAMin, Hydrogen, Rosegarden, etc. -- all of which can interface through JACK. Regarding plugins, there are tons; take a look at the LADSPA website. These plugins can be manipulated in a rack-like GUI interface, if that's what you want.
Regarding latency, I routinely get sub-ms kernel/software latencies; I'm limited by the soundcard's capabilities at this point. Of course, to get good latency performance in Linux, you have to be willing to do things like patch your 2.4 kernel (see e.g. Robert Love's preemptable kernel patch and Andrew Morton's low-latency patch. The 2.6 kernels are supposed to provide low latency from the start; it's not yet clear whether they do.
Many of the apps above are still in development/pre-release stages. In other words, while they're completely useable (and many people are using them to make good music), you should expect bugs. For the most part, the big ones are gone; but still, saving your work frequently is a good idea.
To me, the biggest problem in Linux pro-audio right now isn't applications. They're not done yet, but they're there, and they're advancing at an amazing rate. To me, the biggest problem is the same one that afflicts a lot of open source projects: lack of good documentation. For one example, the Ardour manual is skeletal; many (most?) people figure out how to use it either from their previous experience with ProTools, or from actually looking at the ProTools manual instead. The situation is the same for other projects. Fortunately, there are lots of mailing lists that