Re: [Help-gnu-music] Lilypond error

[David Boersma]

Hi Helgi,

> I have never been able to find out what music-software to use in Linux,
> I am a musician and a composer,

At http://www.linuxsound.at/ you may find quite a lot of linux music
software. Some of it is very very good, some of it is still in
development. Among it is a list of notation software, with Lily and others
like 'Mup', 'Brahms' and 'Rosegarden'. I would like to see an independent
review article about them. At the Mup site they have a comparison between
Lily and Mup but, well, I do not consider that 'independent'. I did not go
deep into Mup yet (not very deep into Lily either), but from the first
views of it it seems to me that there is quite some difference in
functionality which is not mentioned in the Mup article. Just to mention
one thing.
But well, this starts to deviate from the mailing list subject. 

[...]
> Do you write the music in an editor or do you do that in Lilypond?

As Mats already mentioned in the meantime: in your favorite text editor. 
Its output must be plain ASCII text.

And by the way: I did not try it myself yet, but there is also a tool to
convert midi-file to a lilyfile, which might be handy if you have a
keyboard with midi-output connected to your linuxbox. It saves some typing
of notes. You still have to edit the lily file in order to correct
mistakes, combine parts, add lyrics, add other musical marks, whatever you
like.
All in a text editor. Very, very different from the Sibelius style of
working. See elsewhere for discussions on the need of GUIs (graphical user
interfaces) in music typesetting.


Good luck,
David.