Re: Notation programs usage survey

[David Kastrup]

Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:

> I just received a copy of a survey that Universal Edition did amongst
> a number of "European publishing houses". I'm not sure if that' a
> public document so I only sent it to a list of addressees, if you're
> interested in it write me a private message.
>
> Not surprisingly this exclusively states Score, Finale and Sibelius.

Well, from the top of my head, they wrote to about 17 houses, got
answers from 10, and the survey from 7.

Now if you take a look at
<URL:http://www.miz.org/institutionen/musikverlage-s61>, you'll find
that in Germany alone there are more than 400 music publishers
registered at a central organization.

In particular, we'll be more likely to find small publishers there which
are more flexible in choosing their tools and workflows.

> Interestingly it also names a number of potentially daunting
> challenges in keeping them to work for a considerable time. And
> LilyPond (or text based tools in general) convincingly address exactly
> these issues.

I'm not really persuaded about the "convincingly" aspect: without
in-house expertise, you are likely to encounter bit rot when moving to
newer versions.  What _is_ convincing is that _with_ in-house expertise
the upgrade fatality of "have to retype all because file will not load"
will not really occur.

But the situation "can I deliver LilyPond scores to you" more often than
not will not be met with in-house experts.

> I think I will write to the author of that survey (UE's head of IT
> department), but will wait with that until I may have a few more ideas
> and maybe some feedback.
>
> Any ideas, comments?

Well, it's probably hard to properly _weigh_ a survey including small
publishers.  Nevertheless, it would seem like a broader base would be
more interesting to people wanting to _start_ publishing as it would
cover more publishers without legacy business and workforce to
integrate, and with more leeway to experiment.

-- 
David Kastrup