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Linuxmusician.com Interviews LilyPond Authors 227

Posted by michael 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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Linuxmusician.com Interviews LilyPond Authors More

Linuxmusician.com Interviews LilyPond Authors

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  • One of the quality OSS projects (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Saven Marek ( 739395 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:15AM (#8559717)
    Some F/OSS projects just aim to get a job done, do it, and leave it up to someone else (perhaps less qualified?) to complete things, to produce a complete package that does the job well

    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)

    by jeffkjo1 ( 663413 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:20AM (#8559732) Homepage
    Why is it that so many Unix/Linux programs (and everything else, for that matter) do not provide simple screenshots on their products websites?

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:22AM (#8559738)
      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?

    • Re:Why is it (Score:3, Funny)

      by kfg ( 145172 )
      . . . simple screenshots. . .

      [username@hostname loginname]$

      YMMV

      KFG

    • Re:Why is it (Score:2, Informative)

      by fbform ( 723771 )
      Why is it that so many Unix/Linux programs (and everything else, for that matter) do not provide simple screenshots on their products websites?

      Well, here's what appears to be a screenshot [lilypond.org] of LilyPond in use.

    • Re:Why is it (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Reteo Varala ( 743 )
      You want a screenshot? Well, who am I to let you down? :D

      lilypond (GNU LilyPond) 2.1.0
      Running usr...
      Now processing: `airship.ly'
      Parsing...
      Interpreting music...[8][16][24][32][34]
      Preprocessing graphical objects...
      Calculating line breaks... [3][6][9][12][15][18][21][24][27][30][33][34]
      war ning: Could not find line breaking that satisfies constraints.
      paper output to `airship.tex'...

      Interpreting music...

      ...warning/error messages eliminated...

      MIDI output to `airship.midi'...
      Track ...
      writing header field

    • Re:Why is it (Score:4, Informative)

      by robbyjo ( 315601 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @04:15AM (#8560225) Homepage
      You can see their howto [lilypond.org] pages to see it in action. You probably want to check out some sample outputs [lilypond.org]. And this project [mutopiaproject.org] also uses LilyPond. Check that out.

    • Re:Why is it (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dominic_Mazzoni ( 125164 ) *
      Admittedly, they don't have a link called Screenshots on their main page, but in two clicks you can get to this page [lilypond.org], which leads you on a complete tour of the program, including a page of screenshots [lilypond.org].

    • Re:Why is it (Score:2, Informative)

      by WWWWolf ( 2428 )

      Why is it that so many Unix/Linux programs (and everything else, for that matter) do not provide simple screenshots on their products websites?

      Lilypond not only has screenshots, but a very comprehensive tour [lilypond.org]. Well, these aren't really screenshots, but rather the final output - it's a command-line program, after all. They do have some interesting examples with proper screenshots [lilypond.org], too.

    • "Why is it that so many Unix/Linux programs (and everything else, for that matter) do not provide simple screenshots on their products websites?"

      The documentation [lilypond.org] has sample outputs for each thing as it's being explained.

      If you want to be pedantic about it, they do have a screenshot:

      lilypond test.ly
      GNU LilyPond 1.8.0
      Now processing: `/home/fred/ly/test.ly'
      Parsing...
      Interpreting music...[1]

      PDF output to `test.pdf'...
      DVI output to `test.dvi'...

      If you want a screenshot

  • Seperation of content and presentation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by after ( 669640 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:23AM (#8559739) Journal
    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 [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.)
    • This is not for reproducing sound. It is a music typesetting program. Like TeX, but for music.

    • Re:Seperation of content and presentation (Score:4, Interesting)

      by merphant ( 672048 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @03:04AM (#8560036)
      I have been learning Lilypond lately to typeset a complex piano score (Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody#2). One of the things that struck me is that is that writing Lilypond code is a lot like writing XHTML, except the syntax is different. The syntax lets you group your score into smaller chunks pretty much any way you like. Lilypond uses Scheme (via GUILE) similar you would use CSS to define and alter the default layout. Since Scheme is a programming language, you can also use it to generate content like you would with JavaScript, PHP, etc. It seems that

  • What's in a word ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cyberchondriac ( 456626 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:26AM (#8559748) Journal
    It seems to me that they're trying to redefine "score editor" and yet generally, that's what it seems to be, more or less.
    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.
    • because I wonder how many musicians today can actually read music

      All of them.

      I'd wager the vast majority of rock musicians can't...

      In other news, most popular singers can't sing, most popular guitarists can't play guitar...

      • Re:What's in a word ? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymovs Coward ( 724746 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @02:14AM (#8559900)
        because I wonder how many musicians today can actually read music

        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).

        • not all musical cultures use western notation even when they write music (eg, India)

          Tangentially, and purely for interest, does anyone know if there are similar efforts for non-Western music notation?
          Do formalised notation systems even exist in other music cultures? A quick Googling only seemed to turn up attempts to create Westernised notations for a number of other cultures.
          Anyone?

          • Re:What's in a word ? (Score:3, Interesting)

            by zerblat ( 785 )
            Lots of other cultures use different methods to write down music. Especially in India, China and other parts of Asia.

            What search query did you use? Try this [google.com].

        • Your link states that Dave Brubeck couldn't read music in 1942 when he graduated from university. But it seems unlikely to me that he never learned. Consider this bit from the same URL: Brubeck also had written several symphonic works, which include a ballet. How do you think he communicates his symphonies to the orchestra? By humming?

        • Dave Brubeck can. I was at a talk he gave not too long ago when he joked that he was granted his diploma on the condition that he never play music professionally. He has since learned, since when one of my friends asked a question while getting an autograph, he wrote down a bit of a score to illustrate his point.

    • Re:What's in a word ? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by phliar ( 87116 )

      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... 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.

      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)

      by Dominic_Mazzoni ( 125164 ) * on Sunday March 14, 2004 @06:00AM (#8560463) Homepage
      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.

      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.

  • Market choice (Score:3, Flamebait)

    by dysprosia ( 661648 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:28AM (#8559755)
    I don't understand why Lilypond aims to go back to having a proprietary textual format for typesetting music. Most people, I'd imagine, would want to typeset music graphically, as it's just more intuitive that way (I mean, I'm guessing that, for example, getting two voices per staff would be easier in a GUI system than having to manage the text input).

    Anyone know of a GUI frontend to Lilypond?

    • Re:Market choice (Score:4, Informative)

      by Osty ( 16825 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:39AM (#8559793)

      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).

      • Re:Market choice (Score:4, Insightful)

        by dysprosia ( 661648 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:45AM (#8559816)
        Formatting textual output &/c, in TeX is a little more adaptable for a human being, as TeX and the actual, literal, written text are pretty much close.

        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.
        • From what I can tell, this is not meant for a musician to enter his music into it quick & dirty, just to get a quick, reasonably well typeset score. It is more for someone who already has the music WRITTEN, and wants to print out a really nice looking piece of sheet music.
    • Anyone know of a GUI frontend to Lilypond?

      NoteEdit [tu-chemnitz.de] purports to export to Lilypond format.

    • Re:Market choice (Score:4, Informative)

      by nanowyatt ( 196190 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @02:03AM (#8559870)
      Denemo [sourceforge.net]

    • Re:Market choice (Score:4, Informative)

      by merphant ( 672048 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @02:11AM (#8559893)
      Chris Cannam, the interviewer in the article, is one of the principal authors of Rosegarden [all-day-breakfast.com], a free sequencer and music notation editor that runs on Linux. It can output to both Lilypond and MusicXML, among other formats.

    • Re:Market choice (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Xcott Craver ( 615642 )
      I don't understand why Lilypond aims to go back to having a proprietary textual format for typesetting music. Most people, I'd imagine, would want to typeset music graphically, as it's just more intuitive that way

      Intuitive maybe, but painfully slow. Imagine having to type a paper using your mouse.

      I use ABC notation [gre.ac.uk] to notate tunes, and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet. When I get a tune in my head, I can just type it in quickly, and convert it to sheet music or MIDI on the command line. I

    • Re:Market choice (Score:5, Informative)

      by phliar ( 87116 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @04:47AM (#8560281) Homepage
      I don't understand why Lilypond aims to go back to having a proprietary textual format for typesetting music. Most people, I'd imagine, would want to typeset music graphically, as it's just more intuitive that way
      You might want to distinguish between composing and typesetting. Nothing beats manuscript paper and pen for composing. As Han-Wen says,
      Even in the age of computers, classical composers still write music by scribbling stacks of note-paper full with ideas and fragments, and piecing those bits together to a full score. It's a very laborious process, but computers cannot give them the same overview as a bunch of paper fragments spread out over a desk would do.
      Lilypond is a typesetting system. The composer sends the completed music to the typesetter/engraver who makes it look nice.

      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

      \time 4/4
      \key g\major
      \tempo 4=140 % metronome marking
      g2\pp \< c8 r8 b4 \! % G half note pp and crescendo to
      g2\ff( a4 b4) % G half note ff. The G and quarter notes A and B are slurred
      ...
      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.
    • I mean, I'm guessing that, for example, getting two voices per staff would be easier in a GUI system than having to manage the text input

      It looks pretty easy acutally. Check here [lilypond.org]. Basically, you just enter each voice as a separate sequence, and then combine them by enclosing the whole thing in double angled brackets. Pretty easy on the eyes all in all.

    • Because textual file formats are far more easily transformed. For instance, I recently transcribed a setting of Pachelbel's Canon for bagpipes, using ABC. With four voices, in order to print out a master copy with all four voices, I wrote

      %%staves (1 2 3 4)

      And to get individual copies, I changed it to

      %%staves (1)

      Graphical typesetting programs are indeed more intuitive, and for those who maybe only want to write out a set of exercises for their pupils, or who twice a year write out stuff because t

    • I don't understand why Lilypond aims to go back to having a proprietary textual format for typesetting music.

      Lillypond's format is open, not proprietary.
  • While I know that this is more of a compositing program--at least from what I read so far...as I have shamefully not RTFA--I'm going to take this opportunity to bitch about the one thing that has been keeping me from making the switch to Linux for all these years:

    Audio Apps

    I'm no industry elitist that demands ProTools. in fact, I hate protools. The interface leaves much to be desires...granted, i'll buffer that (admittedly harsh) opinion: I'm a huge fan of CoolEditPro.....("eww, PC audio"...I ca
    • You might want to look here: Linux-sound.org [linux-sound.org]

    • Look into these... (Score:2, Informative)

      by absurdist ( 758409 )
      Planet CCRMA http://ccrma-www.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software / The AGNULA Project http://www.agnula.org/ Enough toys to keep you busy for a day or two.

    • Re:music/audio on linux: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This was modded insightful?

      While I know that this is more of a compositing program--at least from what I read so far...as I have shamefully not RTFA

      Obviously. If you had, you'd know that it's not intended to be used for composition.

      I'm going to take this opportunity to bitch about the one thing that has been keeping me from making the switch to Linux for all these years: Audio Apps

      I have no idea what your requirements are. I don't know when you last looked at the Linux music scene. To me, i

  • LinuxMusician.com!?!?!?

    I'm a penguin fan and all, but there are some things that should not be mixed. Like....

    Water and oil.

    Acids and Alkali

    Nucular [sic] weapons and George Bush.

    Linux and Musicians!

    Music is not about the tool, particularly tools that aren't themselves musical. I mean, you *could* say: "ViolinMusician" but "LinuxMusician" comes across to me like "GasEngineMusician" or "Cassette Tape Musician".

    Just dumb. Sorry. (It's late, Saturday, and I've had a few drinks. So sue me, or as Apple Co
    • Someone has to mod that up as +1 Funny. That was hilarius!!!!
    • Linux and Musicians!

      What do you propose musicians use instead? Mac OS? Windows? What makes the concept of *Linux* and musicians unacceptable?

      By the way...does anyone know how Lillypond and MusiXTeX compare?

  • Ugh... this is like betamax (Score:3, Insightful)

    by reddawnman ( 522025 ) <{moc.liamtoh} {ta} {jblyehyeh}> on Sunday March 14, 2004 @01:40AM (#8559798) Homepage
    Guys, I am a professional musician who occasionaly makes a few hundred bucks setting out of print scores to finale or sibeleus. I also use linux, and like the open source model.

    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)

      by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @02:03AM (#8559869)
      LilyPond is "never going to get off the ground"? It's been around for years and is a wonderful tool that many people use. Quite a lot of music is available from LilyPond's format, including a huge library of music in the public domain, ala Project Gutenberg. I have myself set Arban's Method for trumpet using LilyPond. Your claim is starkly in contrast with current reality.

      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.

    • Re:Ugh... this is like betamax (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Analogy time.

      Finale is to Lilypond
      as Microsoft Office is to LaTeX.

      Seriously, though. Lilypond is an engine.
      There are front-ends being developed for it,
      like Denemo. They're focus isn't being user-friendly,
      it's being effective.
      Personally, I've used it.
      It rules.
      My composer friends want me to re-render
      their scores in it.
      • That's a good analogy. One is expensive and popular, and the other is Free and has better output quality. I don't really understand why people are taught word instead of LaTeX. Is \section so hard to type (nooo i just press bold and press enter a few times... then when i want to change the format i'm up a creek).

        Anyway, computers are much better about being consistient than people. That's why LaTeX'd documents look so good; we know what good documents should look like, and we tell the computer how to
    • """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.""" ...which proves why you are a musician and not a programmer (and why I am not a musician). Core problem: You have to understand and define the problem-space, which is what these Lily people have done. The fact that what you are reading about (see

  • The dangers of noble efforts... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ndykman ( 659315 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @02:08AM (#8559883)
    I was reading this, and it basically summed up how good ideas can go horribly wrong. Basically, the authors are trying to make a tool that matches their ideal of music engraving. So, the use LaTeX markup ideas, add in a Scheme interpreter, don't really bother with MIDI import or other standards, focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else and basically come up with a tool that almost nobody will probably use.

    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)

      by adamjaskie ( 310474 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @02:23AM (#8559922) Homepage
      The thing with software like this is that since it uses a fairly straightforward textual input format, it is quite easy to create other programs that can translate another format into LilyPond. I think it is a rather poor idea for projects to get spread out too thin. LilyPond does one thing: typesets music. And it does it very well. Leave it up to somebody else to make a program to translate from MIDI into LilyPond, or provide a GUI score editor for LilyPond, and let the LilyPond developers concentrate on making the output look as good as it possibly can.

      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.
    • My wife, a singer, had little trouble learning to use Lilypond, and she likes it. She's not a programmer and she's not done much (if any) music engraving before.

  • Counter point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chreekat ( 467943 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @02:15AM (#8559904) Journal
    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.
    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 thought, "If someone did it for typesetting, can't it be done for music?"

    • Re:Counter point (Score:4, Interesting)

      by beanyk ( 230597 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @03:03AM (#8560031)
      Hear, hear.

      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.

    • Re:Counter point (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Spock_NPA ( 12762 )
      What the... I used LaTeX for all my word processing need throughout high school. =) I even heard of this one kid who used it to take notes in AP CS, though I'm of the opinion nothing beats the pencil and paper approach for note taking.

    • Re:Counter point (Score:3, Interesting)

      by nagora ( 177841 )
      You'd be better off learning plain TeX. It's much more flexible and powerful AND easier to learn. LaTeX is bloatware with few advantages unless you are only ever going to work within formats that other people have already designed and that's unlikely.

      TWW

      • Re:Counter point (Score:3, Insightful)

        by adamjaskie ( 310474 )
        That is the point of LaTeX. It is not meant to be flexible. It is meant to let you worry about the content of the document, rather than the format. You tell it you are writing an article, and type up your article, it does the rest. The predefined styles look VERY nice, and if you don't like something about it, you can always edit it a bit. Besides, once you know one, the other is VERY easy.

  • Contradiction? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Feztaa ( 633745 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @02:27AM (#8559932) Homepage
    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.

    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)

      by jesterzog ( 189797 )

      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.

    • Re:Contradiction? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Hitmouse ( 753461 )
      I'd rather put more work into MusicXML rather than damn it from the outset. The limitations in Finale (and Sibelius) plus versioning problems means there is limited appeal for storing music descriptions thus. Remember also that MIDI is not designed as a notation format and that programs reading from it generally have to supply rests etc by interpolation/guesswork. So in some respects MusicXML might be considered "less lean" than MIDI, but the result is an unambiguous rendering of the composer's intent.

    • Re:Contradiction? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 )
      The first statement is talking about semantics, the second is about syntax. Try comparing a LaTeX document to the same thing in XHTML. The XHTML will include more markup (i.e. more syntax), but semantically they are the same. They are saying that the syntax of MusicXML is more complex, but it is less expressive (not semantically equivalent).

  • LilyPond is aimed at a small target market (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dominic_Mazzoni ( 125164 ) * on Sunday March 14, 2004 @02:35AM (#8559963) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:LilyPond is aimed at a small target market (Score:5, Insightful)

      by adamjaskie ( 310474 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @02:48AM (#8559993) Homepage
      Right.

      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.

    • Future possabilities. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I see tools like Lilypond and Rosegarden and other such tools as the audio embodyment of the Unix philosophy of "a tool good at a specific task". This works for stringing commandline tools together, and this works as well as one gets higher level. Imagine for a second collaborationware for musicians, with output everyone can be proud of.
    • 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.

      I'm not sure if LilyPond is for me yet, because I haven't used it, but during two years of composition classes at university and a couple of other years of occasional composition, I used Finale pretty frequently, and the criticisms of Finale the th

    • Re:LilyPond is aimed at a small target market (Score:4, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:29AM (#8560767) Journal
      LilyPond, by itself, is only of use to professional engravers, and only those who are willing to learn how to use it.

      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).

    • LilyPond is not intended for people like me. If you're less serious than I am, LilyPond is definitely not intended for you.

      While I don't disagree with you, apparently the authors of Lily Pond do. Their main page and apparent slogan is "LilyPond, music notation for everyone"

  • Some have the wrong idea (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 14, 2004 @03:15AM (#8560061)
    This is not meant to replace a score editor!!!

    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)

    by foqn1bo ( 519064 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @05:00AM (#8560320)
    At least not in my opinion. The syntax is very simple, and while there is a learning curve in getting started, once you know the basics it's a breeze. Music notation is a relatively sparse system, with a small number of things to worry about. You've got clefs, staves, notes, rests, signatures, accents, performance diacritics, ornamets, and various methods of specifying length and grouping.

    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)

    by hlub ( 153437 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @07:37AM (#8560671)
    As a professional musician I use lilypond a lot. Apart from the
    excellent output quality, lilypond has a couple of advantages that
    haven't been mentioned in the discussion so far:

    • Producing text mixed with music examples (large ones between paragraphs, tiny ones in-line) is tiresome with traditional music notation packages, involving a lot of copying and pasting between notation and text processing programs. Lilypond-book makes this easy (there is only one source file that contains both text and music) An example: source [knoware.nl] and output [knoware.nl].
    • Automated production of different output files from one source file is easy (using a script or a makefile). I routinely produce a violin and a viola version of all my teaching materials. Whenever I change something, it is automatically re-done in both versions.
    • Even on a simple PDA one can create a lilypond file (all you need is a text editor and a few kB of memory). I am often away from home and I do a lot of my notation this way, in trains and between rehearsals.

    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)

    by smcdow ( 114828 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:36AM (#8560790) Homepage
    The ABC Notation [gre.ac.uk] is very popular amongst tradtional music enthusiasts. It's the format of choice for emailing and exchanging tunes on tradional music mailing lists and newsgroups. ABC is in widespread use.

    Here's the introduction:

    abc is a language designed to notate tunes in an ascii format. It was designed primarily for folk and traditional tunes of Western European origin (such as English, Irish and Scottish) which can be written on one stave in standard classical notation. However, it is extendible to many other types of music and recently Steve Allen has coded Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, Movement 2 in abc! Since its introduction at the end of 1991 it has become very popular and there now exist several Windows, Mac, Palmtop and UNIX based tools which can read abc notation and either process it into staff notation or play it through the speakers of a computer.

    One of the most important aims of abc notation, and perhaps one that distinguishes it from most, if not all, computer-readable musical languages is that it can be easily read by humans. In other words, with a little practice, it is possible to play a tune directly from the abc notation without having to process and print it out. Even if this isn't of interest, the resulting clarity of the notation makes it fairly easy to notate tunes. In addition, the ability to write music in abc notation means that it can be easily and portably stored or transported electronically hence enabling the discussion and dissemination of music via email.

    (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)

    by whovian ( 107062 ) on Sunday March 14, 2004 @08:39AM (#8560801)
    Congrats to lily's developers for all their hard work.

    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:GUIDO NoteServer (Score:3, Informative)

      by hanwen ( 8589 )
      It's possible to run LilyPond on a webserver, but we advise against it, as it is a security risk. Lily runs an embedded Scheme interpreter, which is a liability. As a silly example
      \notes { c4_#(ly:export (ly:gulp-file "/etc/passwd")) }
      will print the password file under a note. We are working on securing this feature, though.

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