Dorico/Lilypond/SCORE?

[OCTO]

Interestingly, NoteAbility Pro does not seem to be ramping down development: there's a version for iPad now available. I bought just to have a go. It's not going to win any UI prizes, but there's a lot of functions, certainly.

It would be great to hear in short if it is worth having!

[Den]

NoteAbilityPro 3.211 64-bit

[TaaviHark]

About 5 years ago I obtained a copy of SCORE (with PDF user guide and manual) from an acquaintance and have used it in DOS-BOX running on both Windows 7 and Windows 10 machines.

Please excuse me for being jeallous!!

I have enjoyed browsing through a SCORE manual book I found somewhere over the wide internet.
After some sleepless nights of googleing I haven't found even a single option to obtain SCORE legally or illegally

Can somebody please help me with this?
Would love to experiment with SCORE as a new geeky hobby

[benwiggy]

I know we've all got time on our hands at the moment, but..... ! Have you seen Tantacrul's video showing you the SCORE workflow?

SCORE was fairly expensive - back in the days when software was very expensive. I suspect the only purchases were made by companies, whose copies are now either long gone or in the back of a cupboard. (Good luck finding a floppy disk drive!) Some freelance engravers might have (had) it: I last heard someone say they had it but no longer used it, c. 2005.

I think of SCORE the way I think about metal plate engraving: yes, you can obtain the best results, with a lot of learning and experimenting, but it's an obsolete method from another age. Actually, I'd be more interested in trying sheet engraving.

[OCTO]

The true power of SCORE is in its handling of vector curves. In general, it is a vector graphic software, rather than music TYPE setting, since there are no types to type.
As benwiggy suggested, it is obsolete, but I understand your passion!

See here:
http://www.maresova.net/winscore/
And Archive's Wayback page of the missing site: https://web.archive.org/web/20190602041 ... nload.html

See here for further deep search:
https://www.scorbox.com/
https://github.com/davidstephengrant/SCORElibdsg
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~aj/archives ... ll/648.pdf

Personally, I would go for LilyPond, since it is perhaps closest to SCORE.

[oktophonie]

(I'm the one doing the SCORE'ing in the video)
I bought my copy back in 2002 for £600 or something like that. Still cheaper than Sibelius 7 which was £795 in those days as I recall...

Yes, SCORE is obsolete now. This makes me feel sad as the real problems with it are the legacy hardware limits (vector limits per page, low screen resolution and that sort of thing); the way it works is fundamentally fine, for those who have the patience for it and who want to work that way. Having spent nearly 15+ years sitting in SCORE working all day it became second nature in the end and it was hard to imagine working any other way.

Having written quite a few tools for manipulating SCORE files, and therefore being pretty familiar with a lot of the internal workings, I did make a start on a sort of desktop clone of it which at least got as far as opening up files and being able to display them in a window (at least partly - to implement the translation of all the parameter types and values into graphics would be a huge job, but I made a start on the basics), but that was rather too much work to keep up purely as a hobby, so I abandoned it. I attach a screenshot for the curious.

Incidentally, though SCORE is all vectors, it doesn't do curves - all the curves are drawn as series of short straight lines! (which is why creating and editing symbols was such a pain)

[OCTO]

(I'm the one doing the SCORE'ing in the video)

Oh yes, I guessed so!

Incidentally, though SCORE is all vectors, it doesn't do curves - all the curves are drawn as series of short straight lines! (which is why creating and editing symbols was such a pain)

So that's why the font Score (which is I believe extracted from a PDF) looks pretty much zig-zag, not curved!

But, why the code couldn't be translated from Fortran into another language (Lisp?) and transformed into a fully working new app? I am not a programmer, so that is maybe not possible.

[oktophonie]

Unfortunately the code isn't available; it's not open-source, and when Leland Smith died he left no arrangements in place for what should happen to it, and his family didn't seem interested in doing anything with it.

It would be perfectly possible to recreate it from scratch though (the way it works is fundamentally pretty simple), but it's just something that would take too much time to really be worthwhile.

[struwwelpeter]

I don't know where you can get a full version of SCORE I'm afraid, but the freeware preview versions are out there if you look hard enough.

The freeware Windows ScoreView application is available to download from the archive.org server. It opens .mus files and prints to EPS as well as giving a taste of the SCORE experience! Does everything WinScore does, except save.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191226113 ... nload.html

For those wishing to try the old SCORE out, the freeware SCORE Preview (SCORPREV) application (similar to version 3.11 of SCORE and thus requiring DOSBox or similar to use on modern systems) is available from a mirror of the CCRMA FTP server here:
http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/cc ... pub/score/

Manuals are here:
http://wiki.ccarh.org/images/b/ba/Score-Users-Guide.pdf
http://wiki.ccarh.org/images/c/c8/Score ... Manual.pdf

Hope this helps!

[DatOrganistTho]

I know this is late in the thread, but I wanted to make a comment about LilyPond.

I've gotten right up to the point of creating modern scores in LilyPond. I've learned how to tweak all of the elements of the page, spacing, etc. I've used it to publish several academic and scholarly projects in recent years. I've used it for my own music. I've been working with it since 2008.

What I can say confidently is that LilyPond is only usable when the following three conditions are met:

• You use it with an editor that autocompletes your code (such as Frescobaldi)

• You read the learning manual and recreate all of the examples from scratch (a la "Learn Python the Hard Way")

• You must be good at googling and using the lingo found in the Notation Reference

That last one is crucial. It is so much like programming, and I've been around enough programmers to know that they are dedicated enough to finding solutions to problems, and lazy enough to avoid learning how to do it from scratch (if the solution exists in someone else's snippet). I started using LilyPond before I started using broadband internet, and so my only source of comfort was downloading the Notation Reference and Learning Manual to aimlessly search for a solution). One of the first biggest projects I made in LilyPond was back in 2013 when I was asked to arrange a selection of a famous work by Brahms for String Quartet. At the last minute, I had additional instruments added to the project, and it was the proving grounds for a lot of concepts in LilyPond.

There are a few things I begged for in LilyPond from the getgo:

• Better system-system management of spacing styles. It would be amazing to simply say something to the effect of

  Code: Select all

  page.number = 1 system.number = 3 spacing.after = 4

  and see the spacing after system 3 be tweaked. Right now it is a little better, but there are too many places to keep track of spacing and it's not as elegant as other aspects of the program. Also, if you don't know exactly what you are doing you will be banging your head against the wall when trying different numbers in the tweak yield ZERO effect.

• More intuitive control of slurs and ties. There are still some things that I cannot do.

• Modern music tools: presets for aleatoric boxes, squiggles, lines, etc.

• Part extraction: To get automatic part extraction, you have to save each instrument in a separate file, link them in a master file, and edit back and forth. Essentially, you are setting up an old-school computer directory, and if you don't know what you are doing (meaning, you have to know a little bit of coding) you'll get frustrated. Also, editing spacing, tweaks, etc in those parts is a NIGHTMARE. You'll basically do better keeping two copies of the same music, one in a part file and one in a master score file. That's twice as many places to get notes and have discrepancies between the sources.

I still use it for examples, small projects, easy stuff. But, I've given up on my dream of using only open source apps. I love the "openness" of the file structure, but its biggest strength is also its greatest weakness. Sure, I can semantically parse what's going on without the program (if it were to be abandoned), but at the same time that kind of work is as intensive as creating the file in the first place.

Musescore is next for me, but I won't entertain it probably until 4 (edit: I mispoke). By then, more of the glyphs which are missing should be filled in (on the new Leland font... so gorgeous!), and maybe some better intuitive pallets and being able to use open meter, irrational meter, etc. I'd love to use it for analytic notation, but I'm not sure about that yet. Also, it's still too basic to reproduce some scores of Bach, such as keyboard works with 6 voices per staff!