Re: lilypond

[maurits]

Hi all,



> These days I'm a composer and I use Sibelius 4 as a composition tool,

> and the thought of learning a new language is rather daunting.

Well, in my opinion it is not learning a new language but more like putting a

language you already know into a different syntax.

The beauty of lilypond is that you first write down the contents of the piece

and how it should be played, and after that you can go and tweak the way it

looks.





> Can

> Lilypond accept a Midi file and convert it into its own format, and

> then to its beautiful printed output?

Yes, it can, but my experience is that (unless the piece is rather large) you'd

better retype it in Lilypond.

I have used Cakewalk Sonar as a composition tool because of the very nice way

you can enter notes into a score. Because I click 'm in, the conversion of the

midi file into lilypond should be as straight as the original. Nevertheless, I

found that retyping the score into lilypond was a lot quicker.  :)



> Do composers use Lilypond as

> their primary work system? It seems to me that one needs to have a

> piece already written, on paper perhaps, and then input it to your

> program. Or am I off track here?

I don't use lilypond as a composition system, because I find it difficult to

keep track on all voices at once (I write choir compositions mostly).

It depends a bit on what technique you are using (both your composing technique

and lilypond-typing-technique).



Nevertheless, I think that, in certain ways, knowing the lilypond coding syntax

is a certain kind of freedom. In most notating programs you will find that

changing something can have rather nasty consequences on something else in the

score that has nothing to do with your change.

Besides that, with lilypond you always know how it will look like on print

(after typesetting of course :) ). A real "WYSIWIG" so to say.

With most notation programs, you will hope it will look like the way you edited

it.



regards



Maurits Lamers







----------------------------------------------------------------

This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.