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: 2006-08-21 03:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 03:30 am (UTC)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
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 04:22 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 04:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 05:34 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 06:18 am (UTC)A comparison of no less than 3 GUIs for Lilypond
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7719
What do you mean -- no one does?
Date: 2006-08-21 07:34 am (UTC)There are several other programs that do, as well.
Re: What do you mean -- no one does?
Date: 2006-08-21 11:27 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 11:45 am (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 11:55 am (UTC)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.)
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 12:00 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 12:18 pm (UTC)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
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 12:23 pm (UTC)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.
Probably not a lot of help, just comments...
Date: 2006-08-21 03:10 pm (UTC)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: What do you mean -- no one does?
Date: 2006-08-21 03:23 pm (UTC)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: Probably not a lot of help, just comments...
Date: 2006-08-21 03:39 pm (UTC)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.
Re: What do you mean -- no one does?
Date: 2006-08-21 03:53 pm (UTC)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?
Date: 2006-08-21 04:17 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2006-08-21 04:46 pm (UTC)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.
They got me...
Date: 2006-08-21 05:13 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 06:52 pm (UTC)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)
Re: They got me...
Date: 2006-08-21 06:54 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 07:09 pm (UTC)Well, I was on LB a few years ago, so it is possible. :)
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 07:16 pm (UTC)I'd still prefer a native Linux application, and will put up with some warts in order to stay with that.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 09:24 pm (UTC)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
Re: They got me...
Date: 2006-08-21 11:00 pm (UTC)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...
Date: 2006-08-21 11:43 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 03:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 10:25 am (UTC)There, how's that?
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 11:20 am (UTC)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.