Re: mutopia's shortcomings

[Paul Morris]

On Apr 20, 2015, at 4:29 PM, address@hidden wrote:

In another thread, it seemed like common knowledge that Mutopia has some serious flaws.

Indeed, I’m thinking sheesh, why’s everybody gotta be pickin on the mutopia project?  

Seems to me it has been quite successful in its goals of making sheet music easily available for free, all works in the public domain or under creative commons licenses, in (user-editable, user-improvable) LilyPond format, pdf, and midi — all with volunteer labor.  Looks like the total is over 1900 works now.

Could someone fill me on on what the (most important if there's a whole slew) problems are?

One of the problems is that many of the files are for older versions of LilyPond and so they don’t exactly meet the highest standards of engraving aesthetics (or reflect well on the current quality of LilyPond).

There is an effort underway to update these older files that has made some substantial progress, see:

http://lilypondblog.org/2014/12/catching-up-with-the-mutopia-project/

Another problem is limited volunteer manpower.  (So if anyone is looking for something easy they can do to contribute back to the wider LilyPond ecosystem…)

Cheers,

-Paul