wess-music wrote:
@Pierre
@tisimst
@Knut
and all other colleagues who work mainly with LilyPond:
I have a very sincere question to you friends:
"Why do you prefer LilyPond since there are many other application – most of them you know for sure and even better than me, because I specialised only in Finale?"
...
Does the work with the Lilypond deliver such kind of pleasure of going through the touch of every element?
These are great questions. Let me share a couple of my thoughts about my experience with this program. I have written numerous posts in a variety of places as to why I prefer LilyPond over other programs I've used (Sibelius, MuseScore, etc.). Here are a few reasons:
1.
Default Output - Almost in every case, the default appearance is so close to what I want that I hardly need to hand-tweak anything. If I do want to tweak something (like the shape of a slur, the horizontal offset of a notehead, the thickness of a line), there is usually a simple "override" to do that. In other words, LilyPond gets me to a
much better starting point for editing than any other program I've used. And now that LilyPond supports alternate music fonts, the appearance is infinitely customizable.
2.
File Format - A pure-text file format offers quite a few benefits that a proprietary binary format does not. I can read it on any computer, in the text editor of my choice. I can track the changes
much easier with a source code management tool like GitHub, and thus can always revert to a previous version at any time. The format itself is much more bullet-proof (in terms of readability and future use) than a binary format and is less susceptible to problems when converting to a newer version. There are lots of editors that support many conveniences for quickly inputting/editing the data (like syntax highlighting, command completion, etc.).
3.
Verbosity & Extensibility - In LilyPond syntax, you know
exactly what is being attached to what (like the ends of a slur, or articulations, or dynamics) and is very human-readable most of the time. If I have transposed some music, it's obvious where that takes place. If there's a certain functionality that you want that hasn't been developed yet (especially a programmatic one), then you can use the powerful Scheme language to do that. I had to do that recently with an experimental music font so that I could rotate/mirror noteheads on-the-fly. This would have been totally impossible to do *within* any other notation program and painfully time-consuming in a graphics program.
4.
Separation of Score Content & Structure - In LilyPond, I can intentionally separate the music
content from the the score
structure. What good does this do? It gives me so much more flexibility to use and reuse the music. I can store pretty much anything in a variable for later reuse. For example, I can enter the music for a horn part once and utilize the same content in both the conductor's full score and the individual part's score. At the same time, I can customize the layout and appearance of each of those scores completely independent of each other.
I'll stop there for now. Do I enjoy inputting music this way? I actually do because it has helped me to be more deliberate of my choices and aware of what I want to engrave and how it all works together on the page. Do I miss the instant aural feedback while entering notes? Sometimes, but I can get around that by using LilyPond's MIDI output to do audio-proofing when necessary. I find that I can input a full score just as fast if not faster than with other programs because I can input other notation elements at the same time as inputting notes without much slow-down, if any.
wess-music wrote:
And the next questions: can you compare the work on Lilypond with the same processes done in Sibelius or Finale?
Is it faster of slower? How you find practical solution looking on this limited part of the screen, where the compiled view appears?
In terms of work-flow, like I said before, there's no question for me that it is just as fast if not faster to input music as text than in a graphical environment. If you've seen the tutorials by Ben Lemon, then you'll have been introduced to Frescobaldi (
http://frescobaldi.org/). Each user has their own favorite program, but I have found Frescobaldi to be a total life-saver when working on LilyPond files. One HUGE benefit of this program is the point-and-click functionality (i.e., I can click on a note, articulation, slur, etc. on the engraved score and Frescobaldi automatically shoots the cursor to that location in the input file). This is such a time saver and works very well when I need to make changes.
wess-music wrote:
How about your customers, when they need or request their back up files (archive) in order to fix themselves some mistakes or weaknesses, however slight, after many months or years? (since the compatibility from version to version is a serious thing).
Thankfully, there are a few things going for you (which I've already eluded to). As a human-readable text file, the customer is able to see
exactly what has been done. If the syntax has changed somehow from a previous version, the developers have provided a utility for updating that automatically for the most part. Usually, the syntax doesn't change all that much from version to version, so recent versions of input files will work with little or no changes. In other words, even if you see, for example, that a file was coded for version 2.16.2, more recent versions of LilyPond (like 2.18.2) will likely compile it without problems and without you needing to change anything--and with better results!
There's also been some work to make LilyPond more friendly to the MusicXML and MEI formats, but these are still in development. Importing MusicXML is probably the most supported feature at the moment, though everyone will agree that there's still work to be done there.
wess-music wrote:
Can you manually control the horizontal spacing of single note without touching the vertical (in dense orchestral scores usually)?
Absolutely yes, this can be usually done with a simple tweak. This applies to virtually everything you see on the page.
wess-music wrote:
How big and sophisticated score can be done and can the user decide custom size for page format?
This is another beautiful strength of LilyPond. It has almost no limits to how large/sophisticated a score can be. Add as many staves as you want. Add as many pages as you want. Add as many voices to a staff as you want. Change it to any page format you want. LilyPond can handle it. You may want to tweak some settings to taste, but that's the choice of the user.
wess-music wrote:
How useful is the program when the parts need to be extracted?
VERY useful, although LilyPond kind of works in reverse to other programs. Instead of "extracting" the music of an individual part out of the full score, the parts are created first and then added to the full score. This is a really, really nice way to handle the music, as I've mentioned already.
wess-music wrote:
The biggest concern of mine: can you control in details (long) slurs as in Sibelius or Finale, because those, seen on many sample in the NET are looking IMO a bit confusing if not problematic.
What I mean — the beginnings and endings of the arcs, thickness, floating angle and control points for long span and so on.
Definitely. LilyPond does its best to optimize the shape of ties, slurs, and phrasing slurs, but there are plenty of times (as I'm sure you've seen) that you'll want to adjust their appearance. There are a handful of properties and commands for adjusting slurs to look just how you want (e.g., thickness, control points, eccentricity, etc.), even for items that continue over multiple systems.
The only thing I can think of (related to ties/slurs) that LilyPond doesn't support out-of-the-box is a slur that has a truly flat part. I have no doubt, however, that some of the developers could implement this feature without too much trouble.
wess-music wrote:
What about embedding graphics? If yes, what kind of formats accepts the program?
Yes. The main formats are: post-script (PS), encapsulated post-script (EPS). Any other graphics can usually be converted to these without much trouble. SVG graphics can be embedded, but are a more tricky.
wess-music wrote:
Dash slur/tie?
Not a problem.
wess-music wrote:
Put in a few words: what are the main limitation compared to the known software alternatives?
Not really any. It's mostly just getting used to a different way of inputting music.
wess-music wrote:
I know, there are many questions and it could take long time to answer, but please.
I hope I've answered your questions sufficiently. To be honest, it took me a couple of tries over the years to really understand and appreciate LilyPond. I went back and forth with other programs because I struggled with the switch to text input. Once I forced myself to work through a couple of involved scores, I began to understand things much better and realize the benefits. Now, I can confidently say that I will likely never go back to a GUI-based input program. It doesn't mean that LilyPond is the perfect solution for everyone. There are definitely use-cases where I'd say using LilyPond isn't the right tool for the job. When it comes to publication-grade engraving, however, I wouldn't use any other program. With support for alternate music fonts, it is also excellent at supporting a custom house-style.
Lastly, LilyPond and the supporting programs are being actively developed and improved (and even though the development version is called "unstable", it is rarely truly unstable and I prefer to use it with the latest feature set). The developers are very responsive to users' questions and feature requests. There are so many people on the user-mailing list that want to help when someone gets stuck. Response time is usually within minutes, from my experience.
Also, the LilyPond documentation is deep and well covered, but can be daunting, so definitely start with the Learning Manual (found on
http://lilypond.org/manuals.html) and then move on to the Notation Manual after that. These two will cover most syntax questions you will have. More advanced code can be found in the Snippets manual and in the LilyPond Snippets Repository (or LSR, found at
http://lsr.di.unimi.it/). I've found these immensely helpful when I've needed to do something out of the ordinary.
So, take that for what its worth. I understand that it's a lot to chew on (but you asked for it
) If you want to try LilyPond out without installing anything on your computer, you can always try an online interface called LilyBin (
http://lilybin.com/). I've used this many times, but I mostly stick to working with Frescobaldi on my own machine.