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Linuxmusician.com Interviews LilyPond Authors
Posted by
michael
on Sun Mar 14, 2004 01:12 AM
from the every-good-boy-does-fine dept.
from the every-good-boy-does-fine dept.
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."
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One of the quality OSS projects (Score:3, Interesting)
Han-wen & Jan have done one of the latter, this is a supreme polished job that's only getting better. Kudos
adult desktops & wallpapers [67.160.223.119]
Why is it (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Why is it (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Parent
Re:Why is it (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why is it (Score:3, Funny)
[username@hostname loginname]$
YMMV
KFG
Re:Why is it (Score:3, Interesting)
...warning/error messages eliminated...
Re:Why is it (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Why is it (Score:3, Informative)
Seperation of content and presentation (Score:5, Interesting)
On a side noce GNoise [sourceforge.net] is a good sound editor that I recommend to anyone doing edeting or large sounds like game-music (that is uncompressed in raw format.)
Re:Seperation of content and presentation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Seperation of content and presentation (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
What's in a word ? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:What's in a word ? (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the most significant milestones of human development was the invention of written language. It allowed us to move beyond the oral traditions; it let u
Re:What's in a word ? (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks to strong middle and high school music programs, more people can read music today than ever before.
Reading music is still simply the fastest way for an experienced musician to learn a new piece of music. Many jazz and classical musicians (including myself) can sightread (play it while reading it for the first time) quite complicated pieces of music, up to tempo, which is an extremely valuable skill.
Of course there are a small minority of successful recording artists who can't read music, but the vast majority of successful musicians do read music, and most of them read music well. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Parent
Re:What's in a word ? (Score:5, Interesting)
All of them.
Dave Brubeck can't [duke.edu]. Django Reinhardt couldn't [playjazzguitar.com]. Paco de Lucia can't [geocities.com] (he learned the notation when he wanted to record Falla's classical pieces and Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, but it was laborious). Not all musicians need to know to read music, and not all musical cultures use western notation even when they write music (eg, India).
Parent
Re:What's in a word ? (Score:3, Interesting)
What search query did you use? Try this [google.com].
Market choice (Score:3, Flamebait)
Anyone know of a GUI frontend to Lilypond?
Re:Market choice (Score:4, Informative)
While I'm not completely familiar with Lilypond, from what I understand it's not trying to be the full, end-to-end solution for music typesetting. It's trying to solve the problem of how you can easily represent musical notation in a textual format and get it to print out into a format as close to human engraving as possible. In otherwords, think of it as TeX for music.
Just as there are GUI frontends for TeX (LyX [lyx.org], for instance), it's completely possible to write a GUI frontend for Lilypond. There are already several projects that might fit the bill on Freshmeat [freshmeat.net], and I'd be willing to bet that there are several more over at SourceForge (whether or not any of them actually make it past the pre-alpha stage is anybody's guess).
Parent
Re:Market choice (Score:4, Insightful)
However, for music, most musicians are most comfortable with writing music down in conventional music notation. Conventional music notation, in comparison, compared with LilyPond input are far apart. It's somewhat comparable to painting with a typewriter.
I don't really find much wrong with Lilypond itself, but I don't think it'd work too well for manual input. But coupled with a decent GUI input mechanism, it would work well.
Parent
Re:Market choice (Score:3, Informative)
NoteEdit [tu-chemnitz.de] purports to export to Lilypond format.
Re:Market choice (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Market choice (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Market choice (Score:5, Informative)
I have a lot of music that's hard to read, or scribbled on some paper, or whatever. Transcribing music into the computer is so much easier with Lilypond that with WYSIWYG programs! My hands stay on the keyboard, I look at the music and type
On a WYSIWYG system, think about all the mousing and clicking to select and place key and time signatures, metronome marking, three different note durations, a crescendo, a slur, and dynamics. (The percent sign introduces a comment.) Placing an accent on a note? That's just a character. Repeats? That's one word volta. And so on.Parent
Ugh... this is like betamax (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ugh... this is like betamax (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, I find LilyPond's text format far faster for input than using a GUI. Like speach, music is an abstract concept that the human can nevertheless learn to set in a concrete form using a keyboard. Payware music typesetting programs also has a keyboard input mode, and most advanced users use it.
Parent
Re:Ugh... this is like betamax (Score:3, Insightful)
The dangers of noble efforts... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The dangers of noble efforts... (Score:4, Insightful)
You are right. This is not the software to use to make a simple score for band class. This is software that you use to make your printed music look GOOD. The same reason most people, even people who really like LaTeX, will probably not use LaTeX to write a letter to Aunt May.
Parent
Counter point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Counter point (Score:4, Interesting)
I used Word 2.0 to type up my Master's thesis, which being Physics, had *lots* of equations. Equation Editor was hell. And my Math grad friends were using this thing called LaTeX for theirs, and it intimidated the hell out of me. Now I'm typing up my PhD, and LaTeX is a godsend.
Having something similar for musical scores is cool -- just one or two minor projects I have in mind.
Parent
Contradiction? (Score:3, Interesting)
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"
Re:Contradiction? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's meant around the other way. They're saying that our format is so expressive that it can be used to represent data from any other inferior format. Then they're also saying that because every other format is inferior to our one, converting from ours to something else might cause you to lose some detail that the particular inferior format can't represent.
LilyPond is aimed at a small target market (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:LilyPond is aimed at a small target market (Score:5, Insightful)
Think of LilyPond as the back end. It takes the music, and makes it pretty. This is how things are done in Unix. You do one thing, and you do it well. In the case of LilyPond, this one thing is typesetting music, and it happens to do it VERY well.
It is the job of another software program to provide an interface to LilyPond and make it easy to use.
Parent
Re:LilyPond is aimed at a small target market (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not sure about that. I sing in a choir in my spare time, and we have a collection of sheet music scrawled by previous conductors which is barely readable (it's hard enough to read to prevent people from being able to sight-sing it, for example). I occasionally typeset these using LilyPond. I am by no means a professional engraver, and it only took a couple of hours to learn LilyPond (less time than it took to learn LaTeX, for example. In fact, LilyPond was the thing that convinced me that learning LaTeX was worth doing).
Parent
Some have the wrong idea (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Lilypond is *not* difficult to use. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Advantages of Lilypond (Score:3, Informative)
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 [gnu.org] 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.
ABC Notation (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the introduction:
(Emphasis mine.)ABC is an extremely popular format for collecting and exchanging tunes. There are Large Tune Repositories [norbeck.nu] and Tune Search Engines [mit.edu] using ABC.
GUIDO NoteServer (Score:4, Informative)
I just stumbled across this [noteserver.org] 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.
Re:Yeah, right (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yeah, right (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [tgtools.de] gives me just about everything I could want in a music notation program.......
Re:Yeah, right (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yeah, right (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yeah, right (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Yeah, right (Score:3, Interesting)
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 i
Re:Yeah, right (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Yeah, right (Score:3, Informative)
Re:music/audio on linux: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Article Repost (Score:3, Funny)
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!