Re: mutopia's shortcomings

[Gilles]

On Mon, 20 Apr 2015 19:07:46 -0400, Kieren MacMillan wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> > 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.
>
> Other than the “user-editable, user-improvable” issue, all of those
> things are far better done by IMSLP. Put another way, looking at 
> IMSLP
> (with 310,000 scores) and Mutopia (with 1,900), the shine quickly
> comes off Mutopia for anyone except the handful of hardcore DIY
> musicians who (e.g.,) want to take a violin piece from Mutopia and
> make a guitar arrangement.
>
> I think it would be far better — and probably result in better
> visibility/marketing for Lilypond — if Mutopia were merged into 
> IMSLP.
> (There appears to have been a thought in this direction at some 
> point,
> but not any more; cf.
>
> http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Community_Projects/Mutopia_score_archive).
> Then, for important works, there would be the Lilypond source,
> side-by-side with scans of existing editions. But it seems this was
> considered, and rejected for exactly the reasons that Mutopia now
> flounders (cf.
>
> http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP_talk:Community_Projects/Mutopia_score_archive).

Some pieces accessible on IMSLP were typeset for Mutopia, with a
"publisher" link to Mutopia's site.
So visibility of LilyPond can be achieved through publishing to
IMSLP in addition to Mutopia.

> > On Apr 20, 2015, at 5:58 PM, Simon Albrecht <address@hidden> 
> > wrote:
> >
> > I think it’s mainly three problems:
> > – Lilypond versions, as Paul already mentioned.
>
> Yes.
>
> > – Coding style: the lilypond code I saw till now from Mutopia mostly 
> > gave me a real headache, because it was excessively hard to read, 
> > inefficient or hacky. Which makes reusing it an unpleasant experience.
>
> Yes. I would call real code reuse — certainly anything other than the
> most trivial cut-and-paste exercise — essentially impossible.
>
> > – Visual quality of the output: Many of the scores very effectively 
> > display that using Lilypond does not warrant making beautiful scores
>
> Yes. Urs and I are hoping to change this (dramatically, for the
> better, in one fell swoop) with the openLilyLib stylesheet project.
> But for now, the defaults in Lilypond are far from publication 
> quality
> (IMO).

A word like "stylesheet" looks promising.
I looked at the "openlilylib.org" web site but could not find
the stylesheets.

All the problems with Mutopia stem from not having a standardized
way of managing the layout and contents.  Mutopia should not be
like IMSLP; rather it should be a database of LilyPond input
format (the _music_ part).  With standard stylesheets, one would
be able to automatically update/adapt the contents.

Of course, the devil is in the details... :-}


Gilles