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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."
Some F/OSS projects just aim to get a job done, do it, and leave it up to someone else (perhaps less qualified?) to complete things, to produce a complete package that does the job well
Han-wen & Jan have done one of the latter, this is a supreme polished job that's only getting better. Kudos
adult desktops & wallpapers
A good example of seperating content from presentation is to use an XML-type file (at least have a structured document model) where the music data is defined. Then, have somthing like an XLS sound stylesheet to define how the data will sound like. As a developer, this would create greater posibilities what I could do with the sound that my application processes.
On a side noce GNoise is a good sound editor that I recommend to anyone doing edeting or large sounds like game-music (that is uncompressed in raw format.)
is there anything like cakewalk available for linux?
It seems to me that they're trying to redefine "score editor" and yet generally, that's what it seems to be, more or less.
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. It's not truly a necessity anymore, with a good ear and modern equipment, ideas can quickly be stored for future embellishment or shown to others in the absence of an actual instrument. It's not even necessary for registering with the library of congress, an audio tape will suffice.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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.
Am I missing something or are those two properties mutually contradictory? If converting means removing stuff, then the format would have to be a subset of the original, but if it's expressive enough to express other formats, then would it not also have to be a superset?
I basically read that as "It must be both more and less than what we have, and MusicXML is neither of those things"
The Penguin Producer
I see a number of programs, such as Graphire Music Press, that would negate your statement.
I see tools like Lilypond and Rosegarden and other such tools as the audio embodyment of the Unix philosophy of "a tool good at a specific task". This works for stringing commandline tools together, and this works as well as one gets higher level. Imagine for a second collaborationware for musicians, with output everyone can be proud of.
Hear, hear.
I used Word 2.0 to type up my Master's thesis, which being Physics, had *lots* of equations. Equation Editor was hell. And my Math grad friends were using this thing called LaTeX for theirs, and it intimidated the hell out of me. Now I'm typing up my PhD, and LaTeX is a godsend.
Having something similar for musical scores is cool -- just one or two minor projects I have in mind.
Intuitive maybe, but painfully slow. Imagine having to type a paper using your mouse.
I use ABC notation to notate tunes, and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet. When I get a tune in my head, I can just type it in quickly, and convert it to sheet music or MIDI on the command line. I don't need any special software to write the music, beyond vi.
Another nice property of ABC notation: you don't have to pass it through software before you can read it. Because it mimics a staff line using ASCII characters, ABC is readable enough that some musicians can sight-read an ABC as well as sheet music. People commonly use the notation in trad music mailing lists or Usenet posts, which is another good reason to have a good plain-text notation for notating melodies.
ABC versus Lilypond: ABC notation is intended for notating melodies (e.g., folk melodies) rather than arbitrary polyphonic music, It is a file format designed to do one specific thing very well, without being extended into something cumbersome but general-purpose.
Xcott
What the... I used LaTeX for all my word processing need throughout high school. =) I even heard of this one kid who used it to take notes in AP CS, though I'm of the opinion nothing beats the pencil and paper approach for note taking.
Regards,
Spock_NPA
Honestly, I have no idea what TeX is, so, I don't know the comparison.
TeX and LaTeX are (roughly) the general typographical layout equivalents of Lilypond -- instead of producing musical scores, one produces text and math formulas. Each is a GUIless program that takes a set of plain text input, and produces a rendered, formatted set of output.
Because BSD and Linux lacked a decent free word processor for a long, long time, a lot of people learned LaTeX in the place of a word processor. LaTeX is really intended for extremely high-quality textual output -- the sort of thing that a typesetter would use to produce a book. As Knuth (the author of TeX) put it, he was shocked when people started requiring college students to use TeX for their papers -- he saw TeX as a system that required more work to use but was worth it when you wanted to go the extra distance and get really good output.
LaTeX (a sort of child of/extension of TeX) is commonly required as a format to submit papers in, since it produces high-quality output and can be used to allow certain formatting tasks that are very difficult with a word processor. Another benefit of LaTeX is that it uses a text format to represent math formulas, and so LaTeX is often used on USENET and other text-based forums to represent complex mathematical formulas. It's relatively quick to enter forumlas into LaTeX, so it's become dominant in the computer science and mathematical fields.
If you've ever run into CSS, you may understand some of the benefit of using a LaTeX-style system over a more conventional GUI. It lets you assign meaning to elements of your document that can let you perform very powerful operations later. For example, have you ever used stylesheet functionality, present in most word processors? This is a very limited form of this. You can "create a new style", assign text to be of that style, and later tweak the format of an entire book easily by changing properties of the style sheet.
May we never see th
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
lilypond looks nice for many things, and i think it's a step in the right direction. the problem is, there's always a rift between what the musicians want to notate and what the software is able to do.
:)
can lilypond notate beams across barlines? can you hide rests? can you make invisible barlines? all this stuff is important to me, since that's the kind of music i write. sibelius does them wonderfully, and i've heard rumors that sibelius' base engine is written in ASM and could be easily ported to linux from OS X.
on the other hand, i have a big problem in that i wrote a lot of stuff in Finale, and then I switched to sibelius, and even the file convertor doesn't work right a lot of the time. if lilypond can offer a good long-term storage format that is easy to read by both humans and computers, it could have a big niche in digital preservation, and be a common point between notation programs.
anyone want to write a finale->lilypond convertor?
For a interactive musicapp to work good, it will need to have a fair amount of typesetting knowledge, and the best way is to have everything integrated. I really think lilypond has some advantages (such as mixing lilypond with LaTeX, beautiful scores), but to be a good replacement for finale and the others, it will need to have an interactive interface. It seems to me that the developers are not really interested in making it confortable for users (they have that right), but that means a that the program is only usefull for musicians which are also hackers (not many of them), and this is an onfortunate waste of effort.