Slashdot Mirror
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."
Here's Cinder
***Here are some of the imdb.com reviews for "Gay Niggers From Outer Space":
p hp
s _s tory_p.html
Summary: The best homosexual racial minority sci-fi film ever.
"Morten Lindbergs classic cult short, Gay Niggers From Outer Space is one of
the first short films to really stick to what the title suggests. From the
time the first gay nigger walked onto the screen up until the final intense
climax with the Tourette's Syndrome Kingdom in Outer Space, it's filled with
dark comedy, action and plenty of suspense. "
"Gay Niggers from Outer Space is a masterpiece of a film. No other film
portraits emotions as majestically and stunningly since The Legend of Nigger
Charley and Home Alone II. With a cast of all-star African niggers and a
director with Kubrick potential, it is no wonder that Gay Niggers from Outer
Space is marked the greatest film of all time."
"From the very first scene where Gay Nigger Harris throws up on his own face
and commits suicide, to the climactic scene where Nigger Ralph Nader and
Nigger Humphrey Bogart fight over the last hashbrown and pick cotton til
their noses bleed, Gay Niggers from Outer Space is the most magical
portrayal of gay niggers open to the public."
***However, no mention is made of the hazadous lifestyle of gay niggers,
so the following is an attempt to explain those hazards in layman's terms:
Despite cries to the contrary in the media, AIDS is still primarily a gay
and black disease. The media loves to report the "growing epidemic" among
whites, when in fact the rate of infection among heterosexual whites is
dropping off significantly year by year. The media though, reports only the
TOTAL current infection rate, not the RELATIVE. So while there are more
cases each year, the RATE of infection is dropping quickly. Except for the
gay/nigger communities, where it's skyrocketing.
Why does AIDS seem to target gays and niggers so much more so than whites
and straights? Anal sex. The anus was not designed to accommodate vigorous
penetration as occurs in anal sex. Unlike the vagina, the anus has very
delicate membranes, which damage easily. Couple that with the fact that
sperm contains immune system suppressing chemicals. That's why the sperm is
not treated as a foreign protein in the vagina...because of the immune
suppressing effects of the sperm cells. Without this effect, pregnancy
could not occur, as the sperm would be attacked as a foreign protein.
In the anus, sperm has the same immune suppressing effect. During anal sex,
the anal wall is torn and open lesions form. Because there is little if any
sensory nerve endings in the anus, this damage often goes unnoticed. The
sperm then induce their immune suppressing effect, and the stage is set.
Various bacteria both beneficial and infectious dwell in the colon, as well
as viral matter. When the anus is ripped open, exposing the blood to the
immune suppressing chemicals in the sperm, and the viral matter passed
along with it, infection is virtually assured.
***So does the skyrocketing rate of AIDS infection mean that there are
skyrocketing rates of gay niggers???
***Not exactly, because most White people don't realize that a large
percentage of nigger males are bisexual. It's a great irony considering all
of their macho posturing and affectations. They tend to admire the male
physique, and when no women are present, they will hip-hop dance with each
other. Any port in a storm will do, because da' brotha's just gots ta
have it!!! Then they pass along the virus to their wives, girlfriends, and
family members.
***Here is a story about this phenomenon from "The Village Voice":
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0123/wright.
And for the Toronto Gay Niggers:
http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2001-08-16/new
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
Why doesn't anyone here seem to interview someone more interesting? I have no idea who the hell these people are, and no idea why I should care.
Hell, go interview that Darl McBride guy everyone here is always blathering about. Here, I'll even give you the contact info I nicked off those posts of his info someone keeps spamming.
Home phone #: (801) 424-2006
Office phone #: (801) 932-5820
Email: darl@sco.com
Cowboy Squeal!
props to popeye
Why is it that so many Unix/Linux programs (and everything else, for that matter) do not provide simple screenshots on their products websites?
If I'm going to download your program and install it (and in many cases, take time to compile it...) I want to know that it's going to look halfway decent when I'm done.
Why is this so hard for some programmers to understand?
I'd like to be able to play music into it. According to the FAQ:
This is crap. Why bother? Why not push Sibelius or Finale to be ported to Linux??
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
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.)
Are you mods gay or something?
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.
I don't understand why Lilypond aims to go back to having a proprietary textual format for typesetting music. Most people, I'd imagine, would want to typeset music graphically, as it's just more intuitive that way (I mean, I'm guessing that, for example, getting two voices per staff would be easier in a GUI system than having to manage the text input).
Anyone know of a GUI frontend to Lilypond?
Talented and creative people use Macs, or Windows at a pinch. I shudder to think at the potential deluge of anime soundtrack remixes that would be unleashed by the releasing of production software to the sweaty, overweight and unshaven Linux hordes. Thank fuck for profit motives.
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--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'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 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?)
Aside from that all I ask for is a simple audio production suite where i can record something, and then playback and record something else. Simple full-duplex operation. I've been doing it in Windows for over 7 years now.....hell, I did it in DOS with my GUS 11 years ago.
Toss in a little simple single-track editing, some simple effects (Chorus/Flange, Dynamics processing, simple verb and delay, etc) and maintain development of the project and you've won yourself a full-fledged permenent windows convert.....and i'm willing to bet I'm not the only one.
Am I just out of touch? Is there already software out there that does this?
~Dan
Jim claims that the traditional music in Sri Lanka has far greater diversity than its western counterpart. Thus a simple music notation system, in his opinion at least, is far better than a complex rigorous one.
Indefinitely Detained US Citizen
Mod me down all you wish, however this is yet another case where we can see that XML is simply equivilent to bloat. We waste bytes storing useless tags, rather than develop a robust binary format which will be quicker to transfer, and allow more storage. Another great example of this is SVG, graphic files were never meant to be human readable - so why bother promoting a format that encourages this.
LinuxMusician.com!?!?!?
I'm a penguin fan and all, but there are some things that should not be mixed. Like....
Water and oil.
Acids and Alkali
Nucular [sic] weapons and George Bush.
Linux and Musicians!
Music is not about the tool, particularly tools that aren't themselves musical. I mean, you *could* say: "ViolinMusician" but "LinuxMusician" comes across to me like "GasEngineMusician" or "Cassette Tape Musician".
Just dumb. Sorry. (It's late, Saturday, and I've had a few drinks. So sue me, or as Apple Computer would say, sosumi!)
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Well if you want to nitpick. The "intuitive" way for music is the ear, not the eye. But I'm certain that a GUI would be easy to create.
Guys, I am a professional musician who occasionaly makes a few hundred bucks setting out of print scores to finale or sibeleus. I also use linux, and like the open source model.
The problem is that programmers arent creative in this department... those coders all work at apple.
This is never going to get off the ground, and is a hindrance to the adoption of linux by musicians, when in reality things like jack, ardour, and alsa make it an excellent platform for creative types, a la Pd, miller puckette's wonderful synthesis program.
The developers seem to be focusing on making things "right" and in a description language. Fine, but i dont see how this is going to help inspire musicians to use this arcane latex garbage to print out a set of exercises. Most of my musician friends cant even use finale well, so how can one expect the same of this program.
On the other hand, if your objective is to create a framework for music notation software, midi in, etc, etc, then you need to work with people in that community so that you can have more attention and people drawn to that project.
As it stands now, this software is like enlightenment 17... by the time it gets ready, all the interested people and developers will have gone elsewhere or vanished in disgust.
I agree, most amateur rock musicians probably dont read music.... But think about pro musicians for a second, u know guys in orchestras and such, where everyone needs a piece of music in front of them. This program looks like it would make it much easier to look professional for starters, instead of having to make excuses to the conductor or the violin section on why they can't read the music properly because of glaring errors in it.
music monkey n
1. A person who is capable of making music without actually understanding what they are doing.
Also see: code monkey
That might be perhaps the most ignorant comment i've read here.
Linux is *very* useful to musicians. A Prof at my university, a quite well known computer science phd, is also a music prof. His research is 12 century Chinese music (i'm not making this up). He's relying quite heavily on Gentoo on Alpha for a lot of his custom software.
Musicians and Linux mix together just fine.
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.
I was reading this, and it basically summed up how good ideas can go horribly wrong. Basically, the authors are trying to make a tool that matches their ideal of music engraving. So, the use LaTeX markup ideas, add in a Scheme interpreter, don't really bother with MIDI import or other standards, focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else and basically come up with a tool that almost nobody will probably use.
Because most musicians just want to make readable scores quickly and effectively. They aren't looking to make works of art. Those people that want engraving, will probably pay an engraver to do so. And engravers have their own tools.
The whole thing seemed to be "we make better printouts that anybody else" seems awfully subjective and not really the main point.
A tool that likely takes 10 times as long to make a simple score for band class (not to mention the huge learning curve) is not a good computer tool for most musicians. A tool that bangs out pretty nice scores fast, that's a good use of software.
Ask yourself why the printed word still exists in the midst of audio tapes and CD's? The score is the stone tablet.
Ok, everybody seems to knocking LilyPond so far, so I thought I'd put out my initial opinion. I've been learning LaTeX recently, and in spite of the waves of horror you feel the first time you look at it, it is actually extremely good at what it does. Revelation, I know, but the point is it ISN'T made for high schoolers writing their history reports. Same thing with LilyPond here. It doesn't look easy, but then, typesetting music isn't easy. LilyPond and LaTeX are an order of magnitude less complex, even if the coefficient is higher than, say, MS Word or Finale. I know I would die if I had to write a book in Word. :) I thought, "If someone did it for typesetting, can't it be done for music?"
Also note that this is not intended to be a replacement for Finale, but rather an entirely different way of getting the job done. They've taken to engraving what TeX took to typesetting.
The coolest thing about this project to me is that I was wondering earlier if anything existed.
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"
I think that the real question should be "Does goatse have a vagina?"
A very pressing question indeed.
It all goes downhill from first post
I'm a pretty serious amateur jazz musician, and I do a fair amount of composing and arranging for jazz ensembles of about 8-16 musicians.
LilyPond is not intended for people like me. If you're less serious than I am, LilyPond is definitely not intended for you.
The most popular music notation software is Finale. Finale is buggier than Windows ME and twice as bloated, but once you learn how to use it, it gets the job done. You can enter your notes relatively quickly, tweak them a little, print, and go. While it has some very non-intuitive options, it's straightforward enough that most amateur musicians are able to sit down and click around until they get it to do what they want.
How's the output? Pretty crappy if you don't spend any time playing with it. But if you spend a little bit of time fixing the glaring errors, the result is readable by most musicians.
LilyPond, on the other hand, reads a description of the music in a text-based format, and formats it automatically - using much nicer algorithms than Finale apparently uses. It might take quite a bit longer to get your music input, but the end result will look nice - and will not require nearly as much tweaking.
LilyPond, by itself, is only of use to professional engravers, and only those who are willing to learn how to use it. If somebody ever develops a front-end to LilyPond that's actually integrated (as opposed to something like Rosegarden that can just export to LilyPond's format), then it might be more accessible to the average musician.
Don't get me wrong - I think that LilyPond is great. I just think that a lot of the complaints I'm seeing in this forum are because people don't understand what problem LilyPond is trying to solve and who will benefit.
No, LilyPond is not ready to replace all of the other music notation software out there. But it's one of the best tools for professional music engraving already, and maybe someday it can also be an appropriate tool for the casual user, too.
I sort of enjoy the troll easter eggs...
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.
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.
I guess we all feel your pain. But even in Word 2.0 days you didn't have to use Word 2.0. There were a lot of great editors much better suited for your needs then. On Mac, Windows, Atari, you name it.
And somehow I think comparing text editing and musical score editing doesn't work ...
I think the people who will most benefit from a tool like this are performers and composers in the academic vein. Someone who's studied theory much isn't going to look at .ly source and freak -- they've already spent years learning how to describe music in an abstract form. After doing Figured bass analysis on chord progressions and learning how to cut up a piece into it's atomic parts, something like this will probably make more sense than any other solution out there.
On the other hand, if someone is just looking for a program that they can play music into from a keyboard, or punch a few notes into without having to know much about how notation is structured, then of course Lilypond isn't the program for them.
Maybe some of you are getting 'ease' confused with 'instant gratification'. The only easy thing about Finale in my mind is that you can start the new score wizard set to 'Piano' and enter in notes within seconds. I won't deny this is an attractive feature. Any point past that though, and you have to learn the program and all it's quirks(and believe me if you're uninitiated, there are a few billion of them). Once you go beyond the first steps, the balance shifts considerably. Where Finale fails is in the ease of getting right all the minor details of a complex score, wheras Lilypond is remarkably consistent and structured.
And since the input language to Lily is open, non proprietary plain Ascii, I imagine usable graphical frontends will become available for those who are vehemently opposed to having to write out scores in a description language. Much like there are tools like Dreamweaver for HTML. But I think if I showed Lily in it's raw form to my old Theory and Orchestration teacher from my undergrad years, he'd fall right in love.
Music Typesetting on Linux: The People Behind LilyPond
By Chris Cannam
One of the best-known and most ambitious music programs for Linux is the LilyPond score engraving system. Unlike other typesetting software like Finale or Sibelius, LilyPond is not a score editor, and it has no GUI -- instead it aims to start from a simple textual description of the music and turn it into the highest possible quality output, automatically.
LilyPond is the result of several years of work by Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen. In this extensive interview, Linux Musician's Chris Cannam talks to them about recent and future directions for the project.
Chris: I recently found a file of music examples I had printed out from LilyPond, probably in 1998. The LilyPond printouts looked less professional than they would be today, but many of the capabilities of today's software were in place. What have you been doing for the last six years?
Han-Wen: About five years ago we were working up to release 1.0. Our target was to have a usable program that could produce basic music notation, where we defined "basic" as "whatever is in our set of simple test pieces", and usable was "will not dump core, mostly."
We succeeded, but of course it didn't work very well for things that weren't in our test-pieces. By that time, we were also reaching the bounds of what was possible in our model of notation, an object-oriented model, hard-coded in C++. So we decided to integrate the GNU's GUILE library, a Scheme interpreter which was specifically designed to extend programs. We spent the next two to three years refactoring our C++ code into Scheme functions. This resulted in a more flexible, more efficient and better maintainable program.
"We knew what 'publication quality' engraving meant, and were determined to perfect Lily into producing that."
The second big change was catalyzed by an invitation to join a workshop in Firenze, Italy, organized by Nicola Bernardini of AGNULA fame, then director of Centro Tempo Reale. At the workshop we met Nicola, a few top-notch engravers, and an editor for Universal Edition, an Austrian publisher that does a lot of contemporary music. We had the chance to discuss LilyPond with several experts. On the one hand, we were thrilled that they took us seriously, but on the other hand they pointed to several inadequacies in our output. We arrived back home a great deal wiser.
We knew what "publication quality" engraving meant, and were determined to perfect Lily into producing that. Since we like hand-engraved music, we started reproducing simple pieces in LilyPond and comparing the output side-by-side. By doing close comparisons, we learned how music should really look, and we fixed all the deficiencies that we found.
In anything that you write, there will always be a neat, simple, small idea that is obscured by crufty implementation, bad design or suboptimal algorithms. According to me, the real art of programming is recognizing the neat idea, and being ruthless enough to redo all the other bad bits. Since we're writing new code all the time, we also have continue to refactoring everything, and this how we have spent the last few years: coding new stuff, and refactoring old stuff.
We also did a lot with the documentation. Some of our users complain about the current documentation, and they're probably right, but what we have now is light-years ahead of the manual a few years ago.
Your website features an essay on music typesetting that is quite critical of other software, with an entertaining piece of bad typesetting from Finale. You make an effort to explain that it isn't just an exceptional example -- but surely if programs like Finale and Sibelius are so widely used by good musicians, they can't really be that bad?
The default output of Finale is indeed shockingly bad, which is why almost all other vendors routinely compare their packages to Finale. Of course, that's why we use it too. The default layout of Sibelius is not very elegant, bu
Do you usually feel that when you've settled on something and encoded it as your preferred test output, that decision is sound and final? Yes, I often feel like that after taco slides his cock up my ass, but after a while, users always pop up with obscure examples where our approach fails. If possible, I try to enhance Lily to deal with their complex cases too.
Current karma: Terrible (due to mods without a sense of humor)
I should have said that TeX/LaTeX take "text input", not "plain text input". They have markup embedded in the text.
May we never see th
The thing with most unix programs is that they generally don't have a huge visual element to them anyway (witness grep, tar etc.), whereas sheet music is inherently visual.
More to the point, this forces you to use a linear approach - you can't see what you're score looks like until you've written it, as opposed to the real-time effect that you can get in Sibelius, for example. It also limits the effectiveness of graphical front-ends - to be WYSIWYF they have to reinvent the wheel.
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.
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.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I agree with Han-Wen's criticisms of MusicXML, (some of which he voiced previously in a response to the short article I submitted in January). I readily admit that the blurb had some errors in it; and especially after witnessing the prevailing confusion over the issues involved, I wish I had written a full-length article on the state of free music score publishing and interchange.
MusicXML fails in many ways, but neither Lilypond's native format nor the various binary formats fits the bill, either. My intention in submitting the article was to make people aware that there is currently no open, editable, universal, web-renderable music notation format. Please bear in mind that MIDI is not a music notation format, and is inadequate for the purposes described above. LilyPond is a great program and a high caliber open-source development project which I admire and endorse--this is a lot more than I can say for MusicXML (regardless of the apples and oranges comparison). But I don't think it will thrive until it has a GUI and expands into the markets ruled by Sibelius, Finale, and (to a lesser extent) Encore. In other words, I think that to become a major player, LilyPond must eventually must, in addition to being the superb typesetting program that it is, it must also reach those who want an intuitive score editor.
I'm very please that open source music typesetting and publishing are topics of ongoing discussion (and controversy). Finally, I should mention that I'm affiliated with neither Recordaire nor LilyPond in any way.
You could have provided a link to the pdf, which is what the parent poster was wondering about.
// Jens M Andreasen
mvh
send + more == money?
I love the idea, but looking throughthe site even a seasoned Linux vtran CAN NOT get a linux pc doing his music work.
there is lots of words and ideas on the site but absolutely ZERO content.
the tutorial on rosegarden is 100% worthless, they dont even cover how the hell you get it set up so you can actually input/output anything.
Nothing about JACK nothing about the wild fight to get MIDI working reliabily under ALSA and JACK.
no real reccomendations as to what hardware to buy because it does work, just a wishy-washy "most soundcards come with a midi port on the joystick..
how about the fact that most soundcards absolutely SUCK at midi/audio recording? why not a list of "
these fricking work good"
linuxmusician.com is a worthless website for a bunch of fanboys, and i constantly reccomend to people that are interested in linux and music to AVOID it.
let us all know wher there is a REAL website devoted to getting linux and musicians working together...
1) Post a link to something "adult" in a first-ish post thread on a mainpage slashdot article.
2) ???
3) Death (or profit)
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?
This is how the logic works:
1) I'm not a professional musician.
2) I can't read music.
3) I can play instruments to some extent.
Therefore:
4) Proffesional musicians no longer need to be able to read music.
Dumb...you're not in their class, yet you claim authority. Like it or not, most musicians did study music, did have to pass reading exams, did find it a valuable tool for cummunication.
And this continues to be the case.
One interesting example is Danny Elfman, formerly leader of the group Oingo Boingo now the creator of many movies scores. Up to a few years ago, much of his working drafts were scored on paper and then entered into the computer later.
Those scores are critical for the orchestras...it's how they work. They get the scores, sit down, and play it. No one goes around the room humming their part to them.
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 assume this guy didnt design GIF or PNG then (might have designed JPEG)
Take a look at www.tomplay.com.
What i want is something where i can copy in a sheet of music or a few bars and hear what it would sound like. if you really want someting to teach music students with this would be it because you coul experiment and verifiy ideas or intent.
Does Lilypond, or any other program, for that matter, do a good job of drum music? Don't just drumset, but marching percussion, too? With diddles, shots, pings, rolls, 32nd notes, whatever? I have never seen a program that handles all of these things, and it would be great if there were one.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I'm also writing up my PhD, which also has a lot of equations in it. I knew about LaTeX from my undergrad days in mathematics and was happily writing my PhD in LaTeX until I discovered LyX.
According to the website LyX is a WYSIWYM document processor - What You See Is What You Mean. Basically, it's a Word-like frontend for LaTeX documents. Editing normal text is just like any word processor: ctrl-b for toggling bold, etc. But hit ctrl-m and you go into "math-mode" where standard LaTeX markup is understood and converted as you type into integral signs, sigmas, fractions, etc. Bibliographies, multifile documents, references and tables are all very well handled. It also has hooks for inlining XFig and other graphics including Grace plots.
At the end of the day (or paper), you still get beautiful LaTeX output but without having to worry nearly as much about compile errors. Why? Because, under the hood and behind the GUI you're editing LaTeX.
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"-T.S.Eliot
It doesn't matter that some musicians don't read music. Some musicians can't play keyboard. Some can't sing. Some software developers don't know C!
What matters is that a good number can. I do all sorts: I've written music for a choir, played bass in the theatre, sung solos and chorus parts in in rock shows and classical concerts, I play keyboard in a band, and lots more. And almost all of it all takes printed music. Yes, sometimes I can get away with bar charts and chord symbols; sometimes I learn from recordings and lyrics; sometimes I enter music with a piano-roll editor. But I still use music notation more than everything else put together, and so do most of the people I make music with. It's the most accurate, portable and compatible way of communicating music, and there's still a huge demand for it. Yes, some musicians can't read music. Neither can some drummers [fx: ducks]. But Hovis aren't going out of business because some people don't eat bread, and neither are score-writing packages of various kinds.
I'm just getting started with LilyPod (I've completed one piece, and working on a couple of others), and I can tell you that it's much the best output I've seen, well worth the extra effort. Many packages will get you half-way there fairly easily, but half-way there does not look good. It's like comparing old, crude monospaced dot-matrix text with professional print -- it conveys roughly the same information, but it's much harder to follow and makes you work for it. Some packages can even get 90% of the way there (e.g. Cubase Score, Sibelius), but the last 20% of that takes forever, tweaking and adjusting and cursing, and the result is fragile. Only LilyPond can get the final 10% of the way there -- in a simple, robust way, producing output that looks like a piece of music rather than a bunch of music symbols on a page.
LilyPond isn't perfect. It's hard to learn even for an experiencer programmer like me; and it has trouble with complex vocal scores (e.g. where vocal lines combine or split, or switch between sharing staves and/or lyrics and each having their own; can anyone help with these cases?). But its output is far more, well, musical than anything else I've seen.
Use whatever notation or package is most useful to you. You don't have to use standard music notation, or LilyPond, if you don't want to. But there are plenty of us who do; isn't that what matters?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
GNAA / Google confirms: Linux is dying.
By GNAA Staff
Here you have it: it's official; Google confirms: Desktop Linux is dying.
Now, you might be thinking this is just another cut & paste troll based on the typical *BSD is dying bullshit.
It isn't.
As you might have know, your favorite search engine, Google, has been running a little statistics service, called "Zeitgeist".
Since about a year ago, they started providing statistics of the operating systems used to access their search engine worldwide.
I will let the numbers speak for themselves:
Operating Systems Accessing Google in January 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in March 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in April 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in May 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in June 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in July 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in August 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in September 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in November 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in December 2002
Operating Systems Accessing Google in January 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in February 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in April 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in May 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in June 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in July 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in August 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in September 2003
Operating Systems Accessing Google in November 2003
If you've looked at even a few of these links, you don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Desktop Linux's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Desktop Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Linux on Desktop because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux on Desktop. As many of us are already aware, Linux on Desktop continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
According to Google Zeitgeist, there are about 80% of Internet Explorer 6 users. The only platform supporting Internet Explorer 6 is, of course, Microsoft Windows. These statistics are consistent with the earlier presented graphs of the operating systems used to access Google, with the Windows family consistently taking the top 3 ranks. Out of remaining 20%, the split is even between MSIE 5.5, MSIE 5.0, both Windows-only browsers. Netscape 5.x
Posting of the text of a slashdotted article anonomously is NOT trolling.
If done under your username, it is Karma Whoring, so you get mod moints.
In this case, it may be redundant, as it is seen elsewhere above. If it is posted LATER, it is redundant.
Sometimes things get posted anon and are not seen, moderators should always browse at -1.
Actually, polyphony is one of those areas where LilyPond scores (ha!) rather highly. Straight parallel-part writing is easy enough; you can either enter the two parts separately, or combine them as chords or interspersed parts. But it excels where notes overlap and combine in ad-hoc, shifting ways, such as complex piano music. LilyPond makes it easy to describe this sort of thing, to arbitrary complexity, with chords/clusters, nested parts, small- as well as large-scale parallelism, and the ability to create/use/destroy extra parts as you go along. Even in my (so far only) experiment with arranging a piano part, I found I'd naturally written stuff that even a complex GUI package just wouldn't be able to do.
Your general point is sort of valid, though. I believe there are several GUIs which can output LilyPond format, some dedicated and some more general, and it also comes with convertors from MIDI, ABC, and other popular formats. So you could easily write and/or enter music some other way, and then use LilyPond for the final engraving (which seems to be its aim). OTOH, its own text format is straightforward enough for what it does, and I personally look forward to using it some more. Whatever works for you, I guess.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Uh, I've played some of Brubeck's music. Um, yes I would say that he does indeed read music. Yes, lots of jazz folks start out without music, as DUH! jazz music relies on the ear and that's a good way to start. Get your story straight before making ridiculous claims man.
I think Han-Wen's real criticism of MusicXML is revealed when he says:
In other words, here is another developer who wants to lock you into his own program and format. Data can flow into Lilypond, but it should never leave. MusicXML's whole purpose is to exchange symbolic musical data between applications. So people who have a proprietary data mindset will naturally find reasons to criticize it.
People can work on an open source project and still want to lock you into their proprietary format. Plenty of open source projects use MusicXML even if LilyPond doesn't.
I don't understand how "MusicXML fails in many ways", but that is probably a question best discussed on the MusicXML discussion list rather than here.
There are plenty of hooks for doing MusicXML output from LilyPond, and there are no legal encumbrances whatsoever barring an implementation In fact, I'll gladly accept any well-coded patches for MusicXML-output. Or you can hire me, and I'll code the support for you.
However, there is no incentive for me to code this feature for free. That's why I'm not doing it.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
"...the main asset of having MusicXML-output is that users can migrate away from LilyPond more easily, and that doesn't give me warm fuzzies."
Yes, that's a damning (and disappointing) quote, especially coming from an OSS developer.
Claiming that MusicXML fails on many levels was a concession to its critics, but not a hollow one. However, I'll respect your wishes and refrain from expounding on this point here. I reject the criticisms of MusicXML that condemn it simply because it's based on XML. However, there are some valid criticisms that stem from this issue, one or two of which Han-Wen articulated. Recordare itself made sacrifices in developing the format (verbalized on the website), which may or may not ultimately impair its acceptance.
To be honest, I was very excited when I first learned about MusicXML (when Sharpeye started supporting it), but my enthusiasm waned when I learned how much MusicXML's interoperability depends on propietary plugins (Dolet) and third-party converters in most cases. Hopefully this is temporary inconvenience that would be chiefly allieviated by official support in the next releases of Finale and Sibelius. OSS purists could target Recordare with comments similar to that which you made about Han-Wen: that there can exist a dichotomy of open source code and proprietary constrictions that betray a conflict of interests.
I personally think that the 1.0 DTD status should have been accompanied--if not preceded--by web browser plugins. This may be one of the most significant things that Recordare can do to bolster MusicXML's popularity and profile.
Some people who claim that they exchange scores online ask what MusicXML can do for them, since conversion apparently isn't a problem for them. I feel that being able to render music seemlessly in the browser is a big deal, and I think it would make a lot of people sit up and take notice of the format.
P.S., It would be nice if you made the mailing list archives publically accessible sans login.
Oh, you can expound here - I just thought you'd get a better discussion on the MusicXML list. I'm curious to see what you think the valid criticisms are. The interview criticisms that I saw were either 1) generic anti-XML, 2) ignorant about MusicXML, or 3) valid criticisms for using MusicXML as a native format for some applications, but not for its intended use as an interchange format. And MusicXML support has been part of Finale for Windows since Finale 2003.
And thanks very much for your earlier Slashdot story!