Re: Best support programs for Lilypond

[Richard Shann]

On Sun, 2016-03-06 at 15:12 +0100, Martin Tarenskeen wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 6 Mar 2016, Richard Shann wrote:
> 
> > Although Denemo is a GUI it can be set up to let you type in music using
> > pretty much the same keystrokes as with a text editor typing LilyPond
> > syntax.
> 
> I have heard many positive things about the power of Denemo. But everytime 
> I decided to give it a try, I soon gave up because I just didn't like the 
> interface
that's a *very* common response - I can see it myself, though I can't
put my finger on it, even the name Denemo appears unattractive to me.
"Rough-Hewn" someone once said. I think if it were in the hands of a
commercial company or a graphic designer it would get a skin written for
it.

>  and wasn't able to find my workflow in it.

yes, you won't find the very work flow you are looking for (unless, like
me you transcribe 18th c. prints for instruments and figured bass using
a MIDI controller), but it has the most (and most easily) customizable
interface of any program I know.

> 
> Personal taste I guess.
> I'm very happy with Gvim, Frescobaldi, and MuseScore and don't need much 
> more options.
> 
> > I would be wary of any approach using MusicXML as a conversion format as
> > it is not a format well-suited to representing music notation. (Not as
> > unsuitable as MIDI, but still very poor).
> 
> I agree that no miracles should be expected from MusicXML. But it has 
> helped me to speed up export from MuseScore to LilyPond in cases when I 
> needed it. And there is still enough room for improving MusicXML support 
> both from/to LilyPond and from/to MuseScore. So the total situation might 
> improve in future.
 "might improve" is scant comfort to someone who has spent hours putting
music into Sibelius, say, only to find that its idea of MusicXML is
unreadable by musicxml2ly. For that reason I have tried to make an
importer for MusicXML in Denemo which always gets the notes, not matter
how much badly written the file. Even so, I have had to hand edit in a
12/8 time signature to the MusicXML output of one of these files to
avoid a ridiculous amount of tidying up. It simply wasn't there.

 By contrast, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the notes,
ornaments, dynamics and so on that you see in Denemo and a bit of
LilyPond syntax that represents it. So, for example if you execute the
Scheme:
(d-Timer 100 "(d-QuickLilyPondPart)")
then every 100 ms Denemo will update the output LilyPond syntax for the
part you are working on, and clicking on Engrave in Frescobaldi will
re-engrave the file that includes it. Not a workflow that I personally
use, but I just tried it out and it works as expected.

Richard