Besides bias, there's the matter of personal taste, of course. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. From what others tell me (about Finale), I get the impression that my judgement isn't too far off. But you tell me, how biased is my judgement in this matter; do you seriously find Finale to be any competition, apropos typesetting quality? Now if you had nominated Amadeus, SCORE, or even Sibelius... But Finale?
What specific typesetting qualities of Finale do you like best? We can change LilyPond, Free Software, remember? (Please refer to hardcopy, we've had complaints from people that saw the PNGs).
Btw, an important reason to use or develop LilyPond is the fact that it's Free Software. The (arguably) poor output quality of <your proprietary package here> isn't as important to me, although it doesn't hurt to be better:-)
That's nonsense, of course. In the normal case, a quarter note sounds for the full duration of, uhm, well, a quarter note (not counting accents such as staccato, saltato). That's four times longer than a sixteenth sounds (gee, I'm good at arithmetic)! This naturally goes for strings, but also for piano and I'm pretty sure it holds for percussion instruments such as timpani too: a sixteenth note will get 'damped' to sound just the duration of a sixteenth, and not sound during the rests (rest = no sound; not necessarily long enough to take a rest).
Although commiting the sinn of replying to my own post, and at the risk of being judged posting redundant, I feel I'd better correct myself: there were some 50 posts on the RoseGarden ( www.bath.ac.uk/~masjpf/rose.html) list this year.
If you're a composer, I guess you need a GUI (well, maybe Mozart didn't). But it is well known that for simple music entry you don't particularly want a GUI, you don't want a mouse anyway.
If that's all really too difficult, there's still hope. As a separate project, work is underway to build a GUI (GTK+) frontend to LilyPond. Check out Denemo: denemo.sourceforge.net. Still in its early stages, but already usable.
There was a discussion on the SCORE mailing list the other day about how rhythm, pitch and ornaments can be typed-in (of course) most efficiently. People tend to prefer seperating them: all pitches first then the rhythm, then marks.
Of course, when you're not using your favourite text editor(TM) for entry, but some integrated notation software, you may find yourself to be back in the eternal computing fields from hell. From the SCORE mailing list:
> BTW has anyone ever answered Yes to "Save this staff of input to a file?"
All the time. If there's a crash while entering, say, the 19th staff of a 20 stave score, all those temp files can recreate your losses much faster then completely retyping. This still happens to me maybe a half dozen times per year.
Are you kidding? Sibelius' output is fair, maybe even good, but no more than that. If you think that Finale has fine output, you maybe haven't seen much fine engraved music (I like Baerenreiter) lately, you don't have a keen eye for typography, or you don't really care, IMHO.
I know of at least two cases where people asked us questions about installing GNU/Linux, only so that they could use LilyPond instead of Finale. If you fall for pretty faces, maybe Windows is for you.
When people say `music', they usually mean `sound' as in mp3 or MIDI. However, because you look for notation software as well, you should check out LilyPond, the GNU music typesetter: www.cs.uu.nl/people/hanwen/lilypond (or www.lilypond.org).
LilyPond also features MIDI output and comes with a separate program (midi2ly) for converting MIDI to LilyPond's input language. However, trying to convert MIDI to sheet music is a rather useless undertaking, IME. Rich MIDI lacks lots of notation features, such as accents, ties (as opposed to a note of double length), chords vs. voices, clefs, grouping into staffs (two voices on one staff, or each on its own), voices that switch staffs, beaming, arpeggios (vs quickly played notes) grace notes and ornaments in general, flageolets, fingering, enharmonics. So, if you want a real nice score, you'll have to edit the resulting score by hand, anyway. It is this editing that takes most of the time, not the entry of plain notes (that is, if you can touch type).
As a separate project, work is underway to build a GUI (GTK+) frontend to LilyPond. Check out Denemo: denemo.sourceforge.net. Still in its early stages, but already usable.
RoseGarden is basically an orphaned project. To quote Elliot Lee: "It isn't going anywhere any time soon." The last post on the Rosegarden mailing list is dated december, 6 1999. There are 2 branches. The first one is the X11 program, and hasn't changed much since the time Han-Wen named LilyPond as a pun on Rosegarden three years ago. They are also doing a complete ground-up rewrite of the package (slated to be 3.0), using Client/Server architecture, CORBA, GUILE, C++ and GTK. This all means that noone is working on the usable 2.x sources, and 3.x doesn't even compile. 2.x doesn't have any LilyPond support, but it is planned for 3.x
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What specific typesetting qualities of Finale do you like best? We can change LilyPond, Free Software, remember? (Please refer to hardcopy, we've had complaints from people that saw the PNGs).
Btw, an important reason to use or develop LilyPond is the fact that it's Free Software. The (arguably) poor output quality of <your proprietary package here> isn't as important to me, although it doesn't hurt to be better :-)
Jan
--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org
Jan
--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org
Jan
--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org
Jan
--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org
Here's your first scale in LilyPond (scale.fly):
For more information, see LilyPond user's manual (170k).
If that's all really too difficult, there's still hope. As a separate project, work is underway to build a GUI (GTK+) frontend to LilyPond. Check out Denemo: denemo.sourceforge.net. Still in its early stages, but already usable.
There was a discussion on the SCORE mailing list the other day about how rhythm, pitch and ornaments can be typed-in (of course) most efficiently. People tend to prefer seperating them: all pitches first then the rhythm, then marks.
Of course, when you're not using your favourite text editor(TM) for entry, but some integrated notation software, you may find yourself to be back in the eternal computing fields from hell. From the SCORE mailing list:
Jan--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org
I know of at least two cases where people asked us questions about installing GNU/Linux, only so that they could use LilyPond instead of Finale. If you fall for pretty faces, maybe Windows is for you.
Jan.
--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org
LilyPond also features MIDI output and comes with a separate program (midi2ly) for converting MIDI to LilyPond's input language. However, trying to convert MIDI to sheet music is a rather useless undertaking, IME. Rich MIDI lacks lots of notation features, such as accents, ties (as opposed to a note of double length), chords vs. voices, clefs, grouping into staffs (two voices on one staff, or each on its own), voices that switch staffs, beaming, arpeggios (vs quickly played notes) grace notes and ornaments in general, flageolets, fingering, enharmonics. So, if you want a real nice score, you'll have to edit the resulting score by hand, anyway. It is this editing that takes most of the time, not the entry of plain notes (that is, if you can touch type).
As a separate project, work is underway to build a GUI (GTK+) frontend to LilyPond. Check out Denemo: denemo.sourceforge.net. Still in its early stages, but already usable.
RoseGarden is basically an orphaned project. To quote Elliot Lee: "It isn't going anywhere any time soon." The last post on the Rosegarden mailing list is dated december, 6 1999. There are 2 branches. The first one is the X11 program, and hasn't changed much since the time Han-Wen named LilyPond as a pun on Rosegarden three years ago. They are also doing a complete ground-up rewrite of the package (slated to be 3.0), using Client/Server architecture, CORBA, GUILE, C++ and GTK. This all means that noone is working on the usable 2.x sources, and 3.x doesn't even compile. 2.x doesn't have any LilyPond support, but it is planned for 3.x
Jan.
--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org