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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
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?
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.)
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?
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
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
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.
As a musician, and someone who publishes their own work, why would I go through the effort to use this program? Using Finale with TgTools gives me just about everything I could want in a music notation program.......
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Because the software is free/open source! As you know, that is more important than being useful.
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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.
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.
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
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'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.
Because this is the Unix way. It does one useful thing, and does it well. The problem of recording (e.g. from MIDI input) and creating nice printed output can be broken down quite naturally into at least two parts. Separating out the typography part makes it simpler to implement and more reliable, and offers flexibility by not binding it tightly to particular solutions to other problems. The apparent convenience of one big monolithic software package can often be outweighed by its disadvantages.
These are eclectic composers: they blend many musical styles (ranging from medieval hoketus via french baroque to gay nigger music) into new pieces.
Wow, where can I get the CD?
Sigh, gotta love blind positive moderation of copyright violation. I'm sure there's more interesting changes in the "repost." That's two so far!
Bitchslapped. Neat.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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?