Common music notation...
Aug. 20th, 2006 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoGrr. 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-23 01:29 pm (UTC)The samples of printed music are kind of disappointing though. Printing is my main goal. I guess I'll be sticking with Lilypond.