Re: 3 questions

[Jean Abou Samra]

Hi,

Le 26/10/2021 à 20:30, Charlie Boilley a écrit :
> Hello,
>
> Relatively new user here.


Welcome on this list!

By the way, is French your native language?
Be aware that also we have a French-speaking
list, lilypond-user-fr.


> Do MuseScore 4.x could attract Lilypond users or will Lilypond still 
> be maintened in the next decade as a open source Dorico alternative ?


MuseScore, Dorico, etc. address different needs, and
consequently attract different persons. LilyPond is
not the best-suited tool as a digital sheet of paper
for composing since copy-and-paste is not as convenient,
structure is more rigid and audio feedback is really
not as polished.

It is most suitable as a music engraving tool. If you
want good-looking scores automatically, LilyPond is for
you. It works well for those who enter large amounts
of music: the text-based input is very efficient
once you have got past the initial learning curve.
It has a semantic approach to tweaks, so you can add
music and not get all of your adjustments destroyed.
It is optimal for manipulating music programmatically,
a capability that some websites out there use for
providing scores in any transposition, tempo, etc.
And it is unbeatable at extensibility. I mean, just
look at the attached pictures and try to reproduce
one in MuseScore (both were made automatically with
Scheme code by users on this list).

Regarding maintenance, there is a developer pool
consisting of 5 to 10 people, and no reason why
it would not stay so -- in fact the set of contributors
is rather in a growing dynamic at the moment.


> - How large is the Lilypond community ? 


If the point of comparison is the MuseScore community,
then it's quite small.

However, if the question behind this is “Will I get
support when I have a problem with LilyPond?”, then
the answer is yes. Reading the list archives will
bring you to many testimonies of the helpfulness of
this list.


> - Why not a Discourse forum ?


lilypond-user is just the place where the community
has built and lives. Once a mailing list has hundreds
of subscribers and its archives have become a search
database for existing solutions, it sticks around.

Also, LilyPond belongs to the GNU umbrella project. Its
basic infrastructure is provided by GNU. There is
a value in that. Even though list archives of lilypond-user
at https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/
may not be the best-looking web page ever, they are
serviced uninterruptedly for 20 years without
maintenance on our end. For a community that is
not so large, reliability matters.

After all, nothing stops anyone from setting up a
server somewhere running Discourse or whatever messaging
platform and build a community there. So far it has
not been done, which gives a pragmatic answer to
your question: if nobody has been willing to do it
so far, then it's doubtful that an active community
could thrive there.

Part of the Python developer community has been
attempting a move to a Discourse instance a few years
ago. It has not gained popularity and is being
considered for removal right now.


> - Why not a clean MusicXML imprt / export thoughout a simpler music 
> representation / abstraction that just works ?

Import: see musicxml2ly
<https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/usage/invoking-musicxml2ly>
and the newer xml2ly
<https://github.com/jacques-menu/musicformats>;
the latter is being actively developed and
is more capable, though not as stable yet.

MusicXML export is a recurring topic. So far,
there has been a lot of discussion without a
complete solution emerging. I'll answer with
a question: why not invest the time yourself
to code a MusicXML export for LilyPond?


Best regards,
Jean

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Industry-Games-hook.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document