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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."
What's the point of a screenshot of a commandline text processor like lilypond?
I'd have thought the scans of the printed output on the site would be more than enough.
What next. Do you want a screenshot of the scrolling messages at boot of the next linux kernel?
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.)
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.
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.
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.