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Rosegarden Developers Interviewed by O'Reilly
rayk_sland writes "Users of the Rosegarden Sequencer project will be gratified to see it featured in O'Reilly's Linux DevCenter web magazine. I am a devoted fan of this program, which allows the user to sequence music using classical music notation, and has many other sequencer features I haven't even properly fathomed (read the article.) The Rosegarden project has recently released a 'pre-1' beta. Almost time for those party streamers..."
Harmony Navigator
And for those that think Gentoo/Ratpoison isn't so mainstream...
Rosegarden doesn't work on Fedora Core3 either.
The trouble I have with Linux music notation is that to use it one practically needs to be a skilled programmer not a composer. Lilypond is on the right track, being a very powerfull parser of an input script, it has the potential to become the very best notation engine around. Rosegarden is a valient attempt to do everything for everybody. So it has the unenviable task of trying to code for midi and notation.
Human performance, by nature is not perfect, the task of cleaning up notation created with midi can be very daunting indeed. The skills of a composer are needed, unfortunately these are skills that require study well beyond what the average musician of today has.
To get to the point, having midi input totally separate from the notation gui, and reducing the program overhead to facilitate notation is a goal that cannot be ignored. Perhaps a non midi dependant gui is the only real answer. Programs like Score, (San Andreas), Musedit, Speedscore, Finale and a few others already do this. However few if any have the scoring elegance of Lilypond. It would be great if a Linux gui like KDE or Gnome included an effective music notation gui.
Er...maybe if they trained up some help, they'd have more time...
:-)
Gee, how come we never thought of this before.
Honestly, if it were that simple do you really believe we wouldn't do it ? "Training" people through email just takes too long, and many contributors have just vanished after a couple of patches. We just can't afford to invest this kind of time into some guy whom we have no way to know if he'll stick around. All projects of this scale have the same kind of problem, there's no simple solution to it.
the point that reprints are usually better than the 2004 material.
The quality of score layout has been steadily declining over the past 20 years. Show me a 2004 Baerenreiter score that can compare favorably with their 1950 prints. I haven't seen any and I do get to see a lot of new music.
The unfortunate reality is that revenue in the serious music publishing business is in decline. This makes good-quality engraving (which requires a lot of work and skill) unaffordable except for the most famous composers of the most prestigious publishers. LilyPond is our try to counter that trend, by making software that produces good output without requiring lots of work or lots of knowledge.
Han-Wen
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
NRPN's are expressed as 4 CC's. They're used if the synth sends and receives NRPN data. A fair number of synths use them to get up to 14-bit resolution on controls -- the resolution of a 7-bit CC is often not enough. Google groups will tell you more about which synths use them.
Logic lets you create a knob-and-slider graphical interface to MIDI gear that doesn't have an interface, and it can be fully automated.
By track automation layers I kind of meant two things. First, you want to be able to record a song and overdub knob and slider moves in the sequencer environment, just like real console automation. These moves then appear as separate sub-tracks that can be seen side-by-side. I can't remember if RG supports mixer automation or not (I doubt it, but it needs to). In Logic: http://logicfaq.omega-art.com/html/faq10.htm#10/
Also, it's important to have separate tracks for MIDI automation with a graphical view of what's going on. A typical synth track might have velocity, pitch-bend, mod wheel data, and you want to be able to see these events in parallel in separate sub-tracks. You also want to be able to do all the normal copying, pasting, and looping on these tracks.
As for MIDI plugins, I see none in the list at the DSSI page. I don't mean a MIDI wrapper around a LADSPA plugin (that's what DSSI claims to provide). I mean a plugin that operates exclusively in the MIDI domain -- it accepts MIDI as input and output. Even something simple like a transpose plugin would be useful.
Instead of treating me like a blowhard, offering fairly valid criticism on one of Linux's two flagship sequencer projects (I tried muse-seq, it was even more frustrating), go and play with Cubase and Logic and some real studio gear, and copy and improve on everything that you like. Or do this and then ask the developers to. If this is beneath you, then you'll never compete -- it's not like Steinberg wasn't up to date with each Emagic offering over the years and vice versa.
I did have Rosegarden running without alsa and jack but found that it crashed big time when I used the notation window. There was no indication of why, doing a demesg didn't help and KDE gave me the usual equivelent of a windows illegal operation message after it crashed.
Yes, BTW, I am dyslexic and find writing complex polyphony easier than the English language.
My original post was not a flame. All I was trying to say was that to write a great music notation GUI the kiss principle somehow gets missed by just about everyone. Look into (the late) Frederick Noads Mac program Speedscore, http://www.noad.com/Nsoft.htm he resisted midi for years...for good reason, too bad the guy who now owns the code won't let it out!
I will give Rosegarden another try though, as I do really enjoy causing software crashes. Gives me a good excuse to get out the pen and paper, and do real music notation!
The league for abused ESL bots
Maybe -- but it's the same sort of nit-picking as complaining about books printed using monospaced fonts, or dot-matrix quality print. Other computer-generated scores may have the same information, and may even look superficially similar, but they do tend to be a bit robotic and inelegant. LilyPond's output is clearer, more natural, and easier to read. Which is exactly the point.
LilyPond isn't perfect; there are some things it's still not easy to do (e.g. vocal scores where lyrics are shared or voices switch between staves, or pieces in free time), and placing of marks like dynamics isn't always ideal. (Though I'm stuck with an older version, so it's probably improved since.) But it has far far better instincts about layout than anything else I've used (Cubase Score and SX, Finale, Harmony Assistant). Although the initial entry may take a little longer than other packages, it needs much much less tweaking afterwards, so it works out quicker overall, as well as producing much more professional output.
Result: even though I've shelled out lots of the folding stuff for Cubase SX, I haven't touched its score editor since installing LilyPond. Those nits can turn out to be more important than you'd think.
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