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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..."
I've tried Rosegarden a couple of times - looks to be a very promising package - i've even contributed some stuff to the project. Last time i tried it though (probably 6-12 months ago) it had a tendancy to die unexpectedly rendering it fairly useless for anything serious. Its good to see its now approaching a final release. I will be trying this out to see how its been coming along - and maybe ... just maybe I can actually write some tunes under linux...
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
It is the only reason I have QT/KDE libs on my PC. But there is something else very interesting in all this. Because the original Rosegarden developer started his programming in GTK-- and moved over to QT :)
I do hope someday there will be a GTK2 interface for this great program, it will minimize the compile time a lot.
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...for all those who've been told they were never promised Rosegarden.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Looks like Rosegarden can export to Lilypond, which is by far the best music notation program AFAIAC. For years in our choir there were sheets made using Finale, and when I remade one using Lilypond people were asking me where is the book that this came from, it just looks so professional. They have a great paper on this .
But once you get it all built, just think how much faster it will run on your system than on other people's ;-)
I think the authors make the point that they want to hold themselves to the standards of hand-engraved scores, NOT computer generated scores. They specifically point out that they don't like most computer-generated prints.
NoteEdit is also decent for sheet music to Lilypond if that's what you're looking for.
Unfortunately the project is half-dead due to percieved disinterest. Doesn't make it less functional though.
Some open source developers disagree with you.
Open source developers usually write software because they want to use it. If they don't want to use it with Windows, then why should they port it just to satisfy some whinging Windows users? Especially the "I couldn't code my way out of a soggy paper bag, but Doing This Would Make Open Source Succeed*!" sort.
* Succeed being defined as "do what I want it to do"
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
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.
It's not that simple.
I maintain a couple of and contribute to a few free software projects. I can build and test on a couple of architectures and a couple of operating systems on my own. I don't have Windows installed, and if it weren't for one machine a roommate uses only to run an accounting program, there wouldn't be an installation of Windows in my home. (That machine has no network connection.)
If I want to know that that software runs on Windows, I have to rely on other programmers who not only can and do run Windows but can and do build software there. I can understand why there seem to be so few of them -- the last time I tried, it was an awful experience -- but telling developers that they should write software that works on Windows is fairly useless.
If you want good free software that runs on Windows, go to this supposedly huge, untapped market, find people capable of developing, testing, and submitting bugs, and point them at those projects that wouldn't mind running on Windows if they had a little help.
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Tell the truth and you won't have so much to remember.
BO: Tell me comrades, what makes you want to give away these products and go open source? Communism? Beatles music? Liberal guilt!?!?!
Guillaume Laurent: Well, first off..
BO: Wait, are you french?
Guillaume Laurent: Yes I am from France and I don't see why that should be held against me, in fact the relationaship between the US and France has always been one of [interuption]
BO: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!
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.
Actually, the text you're linking to is a bit misleading : no coding was ever actually done using plain GTK+, we never even considered that option. We went for gtk-- right away (or, if you prefer, we went for GTK+ as soon as we learned that C++ bindings were available).
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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