I tried LP several years ago and quickly gave up. I decided to try it again because I was frustrated with all of the manual adjustments my Finale scores require, and wanted to see if LP could do better.
LP is indeed better — in that its default decisions are almost always better than Finale’s default. The price you pay is that an LP score is considerably more time-consuming to enter. Although I expect to get better at it over time, I don’t think that disadvantage can ever go away entirely.
I was trained as a software engineer. I later went into a different field, but I haven’t forgotten the concepts — and I feel like I need them. LP resembles coding in a lot of ways. Some of its behavior is reasonably obvious, but much of it is very hard and non-obvious.
By the way, I am typesetting an opera score, which is clearly not the easiest place to start—but that is what I do. I am guessing that whoever designed LP was not thinking of orchestral scores, as some things that ought to be easy (the “MarkLine” concept) are in fact quite difficult.
I am pretty interested in how people learn LilyPond. My own experience
from discovering it around 15 is that I was able to enter simple music
quickly; however, adding staves, instrument names and creating polyphony
caused many hardships (\voiceTwo is not the second voice!, etc.) I wonder
if it'd be a good idea to organize one-time presentations, courses, this
sort of things, for music students − composers are among the primary
types of LilyPond users after all.
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