Re: free LilyPond advertising

[fiëé visuëlle]

Some more usability notes.

I'm only a folk singer and guitar player, but a professional typesetter.
My first notation program was some crap that I got with an used Mac  
(forgot the name, it was discontinued).
On Linux I tried some very early version of LilyPond but never got it  
to work (font issues, AFAIR). The same with MusiXTeX.


For some years I worked with "Harmony Assistant" by Myriad. It's a  
rather cheap shareware and very good for its price - it has  
interesting audio features and its notation output is at least usable  
for print - but ugly in comparison to Finale or LilyPond.

I can't play keyboard, therefore MIDI keyboard input is no way;  
placing notes with a mouse needs forever; character keyboard input is  
usable and fast, but limited. I really liked how I could copy & paste  
passages and transpose (parts of) them with a few keystrokes. Lyrics  
handling was nasty and got other bugs to workaround with every version.

You still find a lot of samples in my "Liederliste" homepage.


Can't remember why I tried LilyPond in 2005 again - I guess I was  
looking for better printable notes. (I do a Unitarian church magazine  
that features a song in every issue.) Using TeX for some years and  
programming since age 14 I had no threshold using the command line  
interface.

Until now I've good templates for my usual kind of work - folk songs  
with one or two voices or choir settings. For lyrics I sometimes have  
to use dirty tricks (e.g. if the number of syllables differs in a  
repeat), but otherwise I'm very happy.

Note and chord input works often blindly typing and is rather fast.
But LilyPond code is kind of a "write only format" - even with only  
one measure per line and some remarks inbetween it gets very hard to  
read or to find some stuff, and I miss a relation between the same  
measure in different voices, that makes debugging sometimes very  
hard. (point & click often doesn't work right.)

My former girlfriend, an Irish folk fiddler, could hardly read notes  
and was used to write down her tunes as "c d e f g" with spacing  
indicating note length. When I gave her a simple LilyPond template,  
she could stick with most of her habits and learned to use simple  
stuff like \repeat very fast, even if she didn't understand most  
computer stuff. So LilyPond *maybe* even good for beginners. ;-)


My choir director uses Finale, and I guess he doesn't tweak much, so  
some parts of our choir notes are rather ugly, esp. lyrics alignment  
(as proven by the OP). No, I don't think I can convince him to use  
LilyPond ;-)  And as I'm used to LilyPond's "soft", classical  
engraving, I find Finale's just a bit too "cool" and pointy. And I  
guess his printer is too low-res...


What I miss using LilyPond:
- EPS or PDF output without unneccessary whitespace and without  
additional files! (for placement in a layout app or processing with TeX)
- possibilities to tweak the MIDI for nicer results (not LilyPond's  
scope, I know)
- automatic "pickup measures" in line breaks (no, Harmony can't do  
that, but I saw it in Capella)
- save transposed parts as source
- some special chord notation (after reading the latest discussion on  
jazz chords I guess my ideas are doable, though...)
- simpler possibilities for additional lyrics below the scores (song  
sheets)
- sound "prehear" with cursor in the note preview
- better overview in longer parts (don't know how - code folding,  
measure counter...?)

The last two would be features of an editor/previewer and not of  
LilyPond itself. Maybe jEdit/LPT can already do that, but most Java  
apps are just too slow on my old Mac G4, and I hate this typical Java  
GUI (Swing?)...


Greetlings from Lake Constance
---
fiëé visuëlle
Henning Hraban Ramm
http://www.fiee.net
http://angerweit.tikon.ch/lieder/
https://www.cacert.org (I'm an assurer)