Common music notation...

[altivo]

Grr. Why can't anyone write a decent editor for music? I mean, the written kind of music. What Woody Guthrie called "fly specks and hen scratches."

I don't want midi input or output. I don't want scrolling piano rolls or blinking piano keys. I don't want to input a melody by playing it on a synth keyboard. I want to use the mouse just the way I would use a pen, and write music onto a staff. Apparently this is considered too difficult or esoteric and something no one wants. Except I do.

I had a program called Copyist that used to work on Windows 95 and produced pretty decent printed music. Unfortunately, it's utterly buggy and unusable on Windows XP and won't run on Linux at all.

THE recommended notation editor for Linux is Lilypond, and it does make nice printed music. It generates PostScript output or a PDF file and the print looks perfect, just like professionally printed pages. You can do all the fancy details, ornamentation, strange things like tone clusters or septuplets, and so forth. The problem is, the input is utterly clunky. Oh, I've adapted to it and can produce nice print, but it's just not pleasant to use. You set the music as type, using ASCII code input from a keyboard and formatting commands like \clef and \bar "||" to get the symbols where you want them. You can't see the results until you run it through the Lilypond "compiler" and the PostScript comes out the other end. Usually it takes several iterations of this to catch errors created in the rather obtuse ASCII input. So... I've spent much of the day constructing (or rather reconstructing) lead sheets for some old traditional Irish tunes that I'm working on. I have my original sheets from 15 years ago when I took an Irish ensemble playing class, but those were generated using SongWright III on MS-DOS, and printed on a dot matrix printer. The paper is turning yellow and the ink is fading badly. Between that and the fact that I now wear bifocals for reading, they were all but illegible. After wrestling with Lilypond all day (no, I have no idea why they called it that) I now have nice crisp black laser printed music, and in larger type too, for easy reading. But still I hate the interface.

Tomorrow starts my real vacation. The weekend didn't count, since I'd have had that off anyway. Tomorrow I get to NOT go to work. Yay. ;D There's a thousand things I should be doing, of course, but I'm thinking about going to see a movie. Go me.

Comments

[hgryphon.livejournal.com]

My parents' first computer was an 8086 with EEPROM made by Tandy. It came with a program like that. You could then make it play your music back with up to 4 different sounds if you chose.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That sounds like Orchestra-90. I had that on my Model III computer, yes. It was like a mini-synthesizer, and not all that bad for the time. It came out before MIDI and cheap keyboards were around. But it didn't do music notation. It did sound output. I still have a lot of files I created for it.

There's a DOS-compatible program that can play those old files back today, using your sound card instead of the dedicated Orchestra-90 attachment. It's on the web, together with an archive of files. I looked once and found some of my own work in the archive. ;p

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Isn't music supposed to be soothing and relaxing? *runs up a tree*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Sure, sometimes. Or it can be exciting and arousing, too.

But we're talking there about the listening or perhaps the performing aspect. As a librarian, obviously I concern myself with recording and studying the material as well, and that's where printed music enters the picture.

I'm not a professional caliber musician, but I'm an advance amateur. Forty five years of music lessons and practice are bound to do something to you. Because I started in classical music and still love it the most, the written score is at the center of my perception. I can listen to music and visualize the writing appearing on a page. I can read a written page and hear the music in my head, just as an ordinary text lets me hear the words in my head. It is natural to me to focus on notation.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

I was just trying to tease you, dang wise ponies.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

*pokes nose in the back of your neck and makes snorty noises, tickling*

There, how's that?

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

*eeeeeks and turns into a ball of fluff as his fur fluffs out*

[calydor.livejournal.com]

I recommend Noteworthy Composer. It's small, easy to use, and does indeed use the mouse for setting up notes.

It is, in all fairness, a midi editor - I think on a computer these days it'll be hard to find any kind of notation program that DOESN'T do midi, since, well, that's what computers use music scores for.

The copy I have is apparently unregistered, so in a way legit. If you want a copy of my trial version (doesn't expire, but does have it's limits to how often you can save a given project etc.) let me know. If not, the address is www.noteworthysoftware.com. The program costs 39 USD if you want the full version.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

I'd like a program that could do both notation for printing, and sound output ... would be really nice if it could de-MIDI-ize by actually nicely mixing sounds into an MP3, .WAV or somesuch.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Timidity is a nice open source program that reads MIDI files and can turn them into quality MP3 output. It doesn't edit the MIDI files, but is strictly a software-based MIDI synthesizer with MP3 or direct audio output. I'm pretty sure it has both Windows and Linux versions.

Lilypond itself does superb printed output and will generate MIDI file output if you ask for it. Again, I'm sure it has both Windows and Linux versions.

The main difficulty for me with Lilypond is that it has no graphical input or editing facility and I haven't liked any of the add-ons I've tried.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I've seen Noteworthy, and Gary has (or had) the demo as well as a full version of something called Music-EZ. Noteworthy is reasonably priced and similar in features to Copyist, but when I tried the demo in wine it bombed. Since I don't run Windows, I ruled it out at that point. I'm willing to pay for software if it is functional and supported, but reluctant to buy Windows-only software because usually they will not support it in the emulated environment. That's why I'm not springing for the $50 upgrade to the current version of Copyist.

I don't care if the program does MIDI, I just don't want it if it is designed around MIDI as the input and output. Virtually all score editing programs do some kind of audio output for checking and error correction and that's fine. Some, however, like one I beta tested for Blue Ribbon years ago, see MIDI as their only purpose, though. The only practical way to enter music into that one was by playing it on a synth keyboard. It didn't do standard music notation at all. That's like trying to use a word processor that only takes voice recognition input and only has audio files as output. There is undoubtedly demand for that sort of thing, but it just isn't what I want. ;p

[darkhorseman.livejournal.com]

WAAAAYY back in the day I had a program that did just that. I think it eather came with my gravis card or my soundblaster 16. This was back in the dos 5.0 windows 3.11 days though. If I can think of the name or find the disk Ill see if it will run on xp. I probibly still have the gravis board at my parents house.. was quite advanced for its time. Might want to look at the suite of tools that came with the audigy and the sblive. I know it had a program that let you use the qwerty keyboard like a midi keyboard and you could play with the notes.

Course I love music but dont ask me to play anything. I sing and am told I can do a good wayland Jennings but I sing only to my horses. I can explain to you how midi, a piano and an electric guitar work but dont ask me to play any of them.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'll bet that was either QuickScore Elite or Copyist (both from Sion Software of Vancouver, B.C.) I still have the Windows 3.1 versions of both programs and they worked quite well on Windows 95. Unfortunately, Copyist was the one I used heavily (the other is oriented toward MIDI entry and editing) and it will not run on Linux with the wine interface. It installs successfully on VMware in Win 98 or WinXP environments, but appears not to handle its windows properly so it's not usable for me. I no longer have native Windows available on my machines. There is a newer version available for about $50 as an upgrade I think, but I'm reluctant to invest more in Windows-based software when I don't actually run Windows.

The Amiga has Deluxe Music (in fact, I was a beta tester for EA when they produced version 2.0 of that) but its printed output was never very good. It has a reasonable graphic input capability, but output is only Amiga IFF format or MIDI (which loses a lot of the detail needed for a printed score.)

[nipper.livejournal.com]

Not to be too facetious, as you have probably done this already, but from google lilypond gui:

A comparison of no less than 3 GUIs for Lilypond
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7719

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen that review, thanks. I have, however, seen both Denemo and Rosegarden. Denemo (I actually tried version 0.7.4) is a failure as far as I'm concerned. For one thing, it crashes a lot and doesn't always save the changes you made even if you explicitly hit the SAVE button. I think it needs a lot of work. The note entry facilities are nearly as clumsy as if you just use the keyboard and a text editor to create Lilypond input directly. I have a fair amount of material already in Lilypond, and although Denemo claims to be able to take Lilypond files and read them, converting them to its own XML format, I could not get that to work. It either crashes on the attempt or insists that the files are improperly formatted. It fails to recognize basic elements, such as "\break" which forces a staff line to end and go to a new line.

I had looked at Rosegarden's web site before, but did not download and try it. They emphasized the "entry via MIDI" option pretty heavily, for one thing, so that I assumed that was their primary focus. I'll have another look this week.

I have not seen NoteEdit before, so I'll have a look at that as well. I see that the reviewer mentions a complaint I had with Denemo: keeping versions in sync seems to be a major issue with these front ends. Lilypond updates regularly and usually the changes are positive and desirable. Denemo seems to be lagging quite a bit, so that Lilypond complains about the old version of the files it creates. Likewise, Denemo's difficulty interpreting Lilypond files may well stem from version issues.

Lilypond itself does a superb job of producing printed output. If you get into the esoteric elements of the code, you can do anything you want. I just wish the same authors would create a more graphical interface for the thing.

[songcoyote.livejournal.com]

Hi Nipper!

Sorry to jump in on this, but it was such a surprise to see you here that I had to say hello. I think we've only "met" (virtually) once on Latex Blue MU* (and I may be misremembering), but I've seen so many references to you there that it seems like I know you better than I do ;)

That's all - nothing else to say unless you'd actually like to converse. Finding out Altivo is a mutual friend was a kick.

Have an excellent week, and then some!

Light and laughter,
SongCoyote (aka Song on Latex Blue)

[nipper.livejournal.com]

Hiya there

Well, I was on LB a few years ago, so it is possible. :)

[songcoyote.livejournal.com]

Possible indeed :)

It's also possible that I know you solely from the artwork Dragonfly posted that included you and/or was done by you. Either way, nice to meet you again, and have fun!

Light and laughter,
SongCoyote

What do you mean -- no one does?

[typographer.livejournal.com]

Alegro Finale does exactly that. That's what I wrote the musical in. You can enter things by playing them in (and sometimes I did that), but most of the time it was point and click for me.

There are several other programs that do, as well.

Re: What do you mean -- no one does?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I've seen Finale several years ago, and it seemed very clumsy to me. It was also very expensive. My complaint is essentially that all the computerized tools for music entry and layout are so difficult to use that they get in the way of what I am trying to do. Drawing and painting programs have gotten to be quite usable now, with a stylus and graphic tablet at least. But I have yet to see a music entry program that works as well.

I suspect it's because of limited demand. Most musicians these days are not oriented toward written music as much as I am, I think.

Re: What do you mean -- no one does?

[calydor.livejournal.com]

Okay, I have to ask this, so don't bite my head off.

In what way is a stylus and tablet for a paint program any different than a keyboard (you know, the music playing kind) for a music composing program? It's a digitized version of the original tools used for that purpose.

Re: What do you mean -- no one does?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

They may resemble each other technically, but the paradigm for the user is quite different. Some musicians compose at the keyboard, work out their harmonies that way, and so forth. For them, using the piano style keyboard as an input device makes excellent sense. For example, I think that's how flaredragon works.

Others take a more left-brained approach, and compose the way an author writes a novel. They think the music in their heads and write it down with a pen and paper. This is closer to the way I approach things. I can interpret the written music onto a keyboard, which is a right brain activity mostly, but I can't hear or imagine a melody or harmony and take it directly to the keyboard. Instead what I hear or imagine turns into symbolic notation first. That's a product of the way I was taught music and the way my mind works. Using a tablet and stylus make use of that particular process, turning the concept into written symbols directly. It's the way I'm accustomed to working, and the one I prefer.

Neither method is superior or particularly preferable. Ideally, one should be able to do both. Really good musicians who are serious composers generally have to do both. Someone like Leonard Bernstein or Johannes Brahms certainly would have worked both ways. I'm only an amateur dabbler, though, and I seek to use the method that is easiest for me. Unfortunately, I'm in the minority among amateurs and the other way is the one that is most in demand, hence the most supported in the software marketplace. Makes sense, but I don't have to like it.

Re: What do you mean -- no one does?

[typographer.livejournal.com]

Maybe you were looking at an older version. Because I know when I was looking to upgrade from my very old Cakewalk, I had an impression from talking with some of my more active music writing friends (ones who actually get paid to compose or arrange) that Allegro's products were bad.

Then I tried a demo anyway, and was quite surprised. When I said as much to one of those aforementioned friends, he said, "Oh, yeah, we're all using Allegro now."

I don't remember it being that expensive, but I also don't put up with the clunkiness of free drawing programs, so my expectations may be out of whack.

Re: Finale

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Looked at their website, and the prices, at least, have come down a lot. Back when I reviewed their product originally, it was something like $799.

I may have a look at their demo versions for the intermediate programs like Printmusic or Allegro. The issue for me is that I don't run native Windows and don't plan to do so again. Some Windows software runs smoothly on Linux, and some does not. It's hard to tell for sure, and the vendors never have any idea. Obviously, I'm reluctant to spend $200 for something I'd use occasionally, especially if it won't run in my preferred environment.

I can envision the user interface I'd want, but have yet to see a program that actually has it. A few come close, but either they are very large and costly or at least, don't perform well in my setting.

Probably not a lot of help, just comments...

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I always thought the best and "official" way to preserve (and register copyright) was to have sheet music of it. The U.S. Copyright Office seems very happy to accept sound recordings for registration, of course. I just thought it would be good to have the notation, even though I'm not exactly a whiz at reading it. Sheet music seems more permanent, in a way. So in the backburner area of my brain there's a project simmering to create a Charlie Monterey Songbook. Whether there's any demand for it as a product, I don't care. I just want it for myself.

As for how I would do it: if my main computer system worked (which is not exactly the case at the moment), I'd use some combination of my main recording software, Cakewalk Guitar Studio 2.0, and Cakewalk Score Writer, the latter of which is designed specifically for outputting notation. I can't say the output is as nice as Lilypond's, from the way you describe Lilypond's output, but it's functional. I can even get words to line up under notes, if I work hard enough at it. One can input using either the mouse or a musical keyboard. My experience with the mouse was that it was clunky and it would work better for me to "key" in the notes from a MIDI keyboard and then go back and edit. (That should also make it a lot easier for the songs I've never notated before, since I can play them and get the right note values -- otherwise I have a lot of "think-work" to do to figure out the details.) That partly explains why CW Guitar Studio is involved, though it might not have to be -- have to look at the CW Score Writer docs again to see if I can go from keyboard to it directly. You commented long ago that Cakewalk is clunky itself (I think; I know the comments were negative), and I cannot disagree with that, especially since my versions are pretty old. Of course, Cakewalk isn't available in Linux, either, as far as I know.

Mind, this is the only system I've tried to make sheet music, and I haven't even done it enough yet to get the routine streamlined. Maybe I should shop around. It doesn't seem like I'm going to work on the songbook anytime soon, anyway, so there's lots of time.

Re: Probably not a lot of help, just comments...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I believe ASCAP or BMI will require printed music, at least the lead sheet format (melody in music notation, guitar chords and lyrics printed) if you use them for registration. The Library of Congress is no longer as useful for registration of materials other than printed text as they once were assumed to be, though of course you can use them. If it ever came to a court case, though, you'd definitely want to have printed materials, not just the audio.

Lilypond is on the same level as Allegro Finale (Windows/Mac software) in terms of the printed output capability. You could use it to typeset and print the music for a full orchestral symphony, complete with the conductor's score, the individual musicians' parts, and the condensed study score for the listener. The results would be as good as any professional music engraver could create. It's open source free software from GNU, and available in both Linux and Windows versions. If you already composed music on staff paper with a pen, transferring your work into print with Lilypond would be pretty easy once you learned the typesetting commands. You might have a leg up on me there. :)

However, since you don't compose that way, Lilypond may not be the thing you'd want. I've tested its ability to take a midi file as input and create printed music from it. It's pretty dismal and difficult to tweak. Others who have responded here mention alternatives that might work better for you and that aren't too expensive. Noteworthy is $40. Copyist is about $70 I think. By contrast, the last time I looked at it (which was a while back,) Allegro Finale was close to $1000.

They got me...

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

I'm reading the essay on Lilypond's website, and they "got" me by focusing on the typography of music first. It makes perfect sense to me, given how much I'm working on page composition at work these days. So why would I want so many of the technical compromises in what I have, huh?

Their initial statement to the effect that easily available computers and software have led to easy but mediocre sheet music echoed in my mind the proliferation of desktop publishing software. Pagemaker and even Word can lay out pages quickly and easily, but you'd have to work very hard to make them lay out nice looking pages, and almost no one will do that. But I suppose that's another rant for another day.

Re: They got me...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

No question about it, Lilypond produces music typography that matches the best there is. They use PostScript to its full capabilities, and the results are beautiful. That really is an appropriate word. They make even a homely Irish ditty like the jig "A Scarce o' Tatties" look like high class music calligraphy. Lilypond is free, so if you're interested, give it a try. You don't need a PostScript printer for output. It will write a standard PDF file that you can view and print with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader program that you probably already have installed.

I agree with you about the mediocre output of common desktop word processors and even page layout programs (such as Microsoft Publisher.) But most of those programs could produce more elegant results in the hands of someone who understands the fine points of typography and page design. I've seen that demonstrated as well. The key lies in an understanding of things like leading, the difference between font and face, and proportional gutters. The defaults in these common programs are set for business letters, not book pages, but they can easily be reset to get the results you need. The only other essential ingredient is the high quality fonts, and not a dozen of them used in the same project but only one or two.

When I was in library school, I had a course on the history of printing in which we had to demonstrate our understanding of the principles of page layout and design by designing a sample book page and printing it on a computer. Rather than using the computers in the school's computer labs, I did mine on my Amiga at home with a primitive page layout program from Gold Disk. My page was still voted best in the class. The key is not letting the program, which after all is written only by programmers, not designers, and hopefully designed for ease of use rather than high precision, default things for you. Take advantage of the ability to overide with precise instructions. Oh, and rather than the crude fonts that come with your OS (whether it is Windows, Mac, or AmigaOS, the included fonts are trash) you want to use some professionally designed ones. I chose two high quality fonts from Agfa Compugraphics. Others used Windows default fonts, even Arial and Times.

Re: They got me...

[songdogmi.livejournal.com]

The key is not letting the program, which after all is written only by programmers, not designers, and hopefully designed for ease of use rather than high precision, default things for you. Take advantage of the ability to overide with precise instructions. Oh, and rather than the crude fonts that come with your OS ... you want to use some professionally designed ones.

Yes. Yes, yes, and yes.

A friend of mine self-published a book years ago, and I've been itching to re-typeset it all purty-like for years. She used WordPerfect but stuck to its defaults, so it's like a very long business memo with chapter breaks, not like a book. Granted, it's not like she had access to a Linotype or anything, but there are things that could've been done (like, say, heads need more space above them and less below, not same spacing in both places -- that's one of my pet peeves). She didn't want to do that, though; it was enough to put the words on a page. I guess that's OK, but I know there are people who would look at it and have a vague sense that something wasn't quite as good as it could've been, even if they couldn't put words to their vague sense.

Re: They got me...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes. Paragraph spacing, leading between lines, that sort of thing is what people can't identify, yet when you show them a default page and one that has taken it into account, they immediately agree which one is better. Another of my big peeves is algorithmic obliques rather than real Italics. Most can see the difference once you point it out to them, but otherwise they are oblivious to it. I find it really jarring. Bad enough we have to see that on web pages. In printed documents it should never happen.

Most modern word processors can handle all this quite tidily through the use of styles or style sheets, but most users never learn to take advantage of those features. Heck, most never learn the difference between typing 5 spaces, or a tab character, or defining the paragraph indent properly.

[leopanthera.livejournal.com]

It's not free, but absolutely nothing beats Sibelius for traditional music composition.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Sibelius is highly rated, and used by many music publishing houses, I know. It also doesn't run on Linux, even under emulation or VMware. That and the price of $250 let me rule it out from the start. I'm willing to pay for software that I can use, but when all the reports say that it won't work in my environment, there's not much point in spending the money. Finale and Noteworthy apparently do run under emulation without major issues.

I'd still prefer a native Linux application, and will put up with some warts in order to stay with that.

[marzolan.livejournal.com]

Anvil Studio at www.anvilstudio.com

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Looks like a capable midi editor all right, though only for windows.

The samples of printed music are kind of disappointing though. Printing is my main goal. I guess I'll be sticking with Lilypond.