Re: producing "archival" scores

[Aaron Dalton]

Josiah Boothby wrote:
> On 4/5/07, Valentin Villenave <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Hello everybody, hello Jason,
>>
>> I would like to add my 2 cents here: though LilyPond syntax evolves
>> indeed very quickly, you'll always be able to find the version of
>> LilyPond which was in use when you first typed your score, on
>> http://lilypond.org/web/install/older-versions or
>> http://download.linuxaudio.org/lilypond/sources/
>>
>> This is why open-Source gives some "guarantees" (well, relatively at
>> least) you won't be able to find with any other proprietary software:
> 
> Just to clarify one small thing: I think that it would be nearly
> impossible -- or at least extraordinarily difficult -- to compile on a
> modern distribution of Linux a sufficiently old version of Lilypond so
> that ancient .ly files can be used directly. The nice thing about the
> old ly files is that the syntax is usually similar enough that if
> convert-ly doesn't work, most of the note-entry should be
> straightforward to reuse, leaving organization and tweaking to be done
> (for me, that usually takes about half of the time of preparing a
> score, so that's not so bad).
> 

Don't the new distributions *include* all the dependencies?  The FreeBSD
and Windows packages seem to.  I don't have an extra box to experiment
with though.  In any case, I agree that the note entry syntax doesn't
change and that represents (for me anyway) 90% of the work.  I will
still rely on Lilypond for archival scores.  Proprietary software won't
cut it (as explained earlier) and MusicXML seems insanely verbose to me.
 The snippet at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicXML is way too long
just to get a clef, time signature, and middle C.

Cheers!
-- 
Aaron Dalton       |   Super Duper Games
address@hidden   |   http://superdupergames.org