can i do this?

[Richard R. Looze]

Hi,

  I want to thank you for spending so much time and effort to provide such a professional offering free of charge so musicians can produce their own high quality sheet music without the restriction of spending a lot of money on a

program like finale.

 

That said, Help!

 

I worked a little in the DOS environment years ago doing highend imagesetter output so I had to learn the basic DOS commands and even successfully made some batch files and additions to autoexec.bat and config.sys files.

 

I have installed the applications for windows that were mentioned on your site

and am able to open up into a Lilypond DOS-like environment but I am unable to

input text as it appears in the tutorial and I have been unsuccessful in changing

directories or copying .ly files into the environment.

The whole thing seems extremely complicated to me as I just want to be

able to create sheet music, not become a computer programmer.

 

Am I going to be able to do this with just a little guidance or is this the

wrong avenue for me to go down?

 

I love what you have done. While still using the powerful program engines and definitions that you already provide, could you create a user friendly windows and mac interface for this great offering. Something where you already have a WYSIWYG page with staff lines that you click on to place snap-to objects such as notes, rests, clefs etc... You shift click a series of notes to automatically tie them together with a preselected 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, etc value. when you click near an ' f ' space on the staff, a note of whatever value you preselected from a list of note intervals automatically appears on the f space. If you missed the mark, you just drag the note to the appropriate position with the mouse. It snaps into place

within the grid parameters of the staff. All symbols available in a pull down or tear off pallet or menu list. That would truly make your offering of value to musicians

without the necessity that they spend much time learning a language in a foreign

environment. They should be spending their time doing what they already know

how to do well. Create music... You could help us tremendously in this way.

I can't afford Finale but I'm writing music all the time---by hand.

Without the requirement of programming skills and many hours of tedious

and complicated learning and data entry this offering could truly be a tool for

any musician with a pc, mac or unix computer if user friendly interfaces were

provided along with an installer that would install ALL neccesary software with

ONE simple installation on that platform. Runtime versions of the other programs

would also be great to reduce the disk space required and offer better integration

and speed along with easy installation. Offering only the neccesary functions of the other programs required by Lilypond. I know that I'm asking a lot, here.

The addition of a graphical interface would make your offering practical and

accessible. Right now, I look at Lilypond and shudder. It's totally intimidating

and my inspiration to write has to be put on hold while I wade through extensive

and very uncertain installation and complicated programming guidelines, rules,

code and a very foreign environment on my windows computer.

 

I know that your offering has helped some who obviously have the neccesary

computer system and programming saavy to handle it in it's present form.

I can tell you as a musician who knows a lot of other musicians that most of

us are not able to deal with this kind of complexity to produce sheet music

but want to be able to offer it in a totally professional format without failing to make rent and eat in order to afford an intuitive application that can do it.

 

If you think I can learn this and you can help online or by phone, let me know.

I am willing to give it a try if I can get help and learn it without struggle.

I don't desire to add unneccesary and unwanted difficulty to the process of offering my music in sheet form for others.

 

Thank you! Your give is appreciated whether the form of your offering appears accessible and useful to me personally or not. I am grateful to you.

 

My email address is:

address@hidden

my name is Chikur and I'm located in Wisconsin, USA.

My phone number is:

608-253-9899

you may reverse the charges if you with to use phone

but of course e-mail is a lot cheaper!