[Lilypond] Numerous Questions & Thoughts

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tisimst
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Re: [Lilypond] Numerous Questions & Thoughts

Post by tisimst »

That's right! I've seen your website http://editionoctoechos.com/ (at least I think it's yours). How long have you been doing this? Have you had good success? What kind of demand do you see? Where do you see the industry going?
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VaughanM
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Re: [Lilypond] Numerous Questions & Thoughts

Post by VaughanM »

I began using Lilypond in 2011 after twenty years on Finale. The things that attracted me to it were its emphasis on producing beautiful scores. I have a bit of a programming background, so I’m not averse to the text input or compiling. I’ve also been using more open-source programs generally.

The music I produce (typeset or composed) is overwhelmingly conventionally notated. It was a big step learning Lilypond (or any new program). I really missed Finale’s Speedy Note Entry, but it wasn’t super-difficult to write a(n improved) version for Lilypond. As with any program there have been plenty of frustrations, but I feel that I’m in a position now to compare workflows between Finale and Lilypond.

Setting up a score: Doing this from scratch is fiddly on either program, so I generally get as much of the template from a previous program.

Entering notes: Having poor keyboard skills, I have always found Finale’s Speedy Note Entry very useful, giving me aural feedback as I go. My little program accepts MIDI input & numeric keystrokes, and converts them into conventional keystrokes that a text editor (in my case Frescobaldi) can accept. I can input notes very rapidly and accurately.

Entering lyrics: I always used Finale’s Click Assignment. By the end of entering a big piece and doing a bit of cutting and pasting, lyrics are generally a mess, sometimes with little relationship to the lyrics as they appear in the music. Lilypond forces you to organize the lyrics sensibly. Finale adds word extensions automatically, which I like. This would be a fairly simple thing to implement in Lilypond, but unfortunately not simple enough for me!

Expression and articulations: My own music has very little of these, but they’re pretty easy to add with Frescobaldi. Good-looking cues are equally as fiddly in Finale and Lilypond (mechanical repetition of what becomes a fairly well-defined workflow). For renaissance music, musica ficta and ligatures are well-handled by Lilypond. If you want to go to a bit of trouble, you can make very impressive-looking incipits with Lilypond’s ancient music capabilities.

Page layout: Where Lilypond really comes into its own is layout. In Finale, the final system contains whatever measures don’t fit, so for pretty much every piece or part, I have to spread out the last few systems to make it look good. Lilypond does this automatically (it’s a complicated business and seems to take up a lot of the compile time), even if you give it quite stringent parameters to work with. The other excellent thing is alto lines. In Finale, unless you want to tweak system-by-system, alto lines that go low will run into the lyrics, or will sit a long way from the staff even if there are no low notes. Lilypond will only place the lyrics far from the staff if the alto line runs low, and on a system-by-system basis. It will also do automatic vertical spacing based on the contents of the staves.

Footnotes: Lilypond’s footnote interface is a little clunky, but it exists and works pretty well once you work it out. I don’t think Finale has footnotes?

Large-scale-compositions: I re-transcribed a 120-page 4 movement renaissance mass. Lilypond was able to produce a score with a table of contents at the front. It was a great thing to be able to do, but like many things in Lilypond, took a bit of experimentation and frustration. In my recent four-movement string quartet, once I had set every acceptable potential page-turning point (there weren’t many), Lilypond produced parts for each instrument containing enough time to turn at the end of each odd-numbered page.

Software versions: Finale does pretty well, providing you have the latest version. Lilypond does pretty good updating, but the messages when it can’t do it are completely baffling. One of the first things I wanted to do was to transpose a Victoria piece for performance. It was easy to find the music in Nancho Alvarez’ amazing archive (http://www.uma.es/victoria/partituras.html), but he has been working for many years, and some of the music is in very old versions of Lilypond, such that it was far beyond my ability as a beginner to transpose it to performing pitch. That said, I haven’t had a problem updating a file for quite a while.

Interchangeability: Finale has MusicXML import and export. Lilypond only has MusicXML import. Moving music from Finale to Lilypond is possible, but it can be quite fiddly, so I only do it if I want to make a major revision. For older pieces I have my copy of Finale 2012, which I’m gradually forgetting how to use :)

So in summary, Lilypond is a bit niche. A recent casual voluntary survey on the mailing list showed that users (the ones that replied, anyway) are older than I would have thought—perhaps old enough to remember working with a command line.
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John Ruggero
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Re: [Lilypond] Numerous Questions & Thoughts

Post by John Ruggero »

FInale's text tool is not appropriate for anything complicated, so I import Finale into InDesign if there are extensive footnotes that include musical examples. And it is easy to combine pdfs of all-text pages from any program with Finale pdfs.
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jrethorst
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Re: [Lilypond] Numerous Questions & Thoughts

Post by jrethorst »

> tisimst, thanks for so nice explanation.

+1
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John Ruggero
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Re: [Lilypond] Numerous Questions & Thoughts

Post by John Ruggero »

VaughanM wrote:
Where Lilypond really comes into its own is layout. In Finale, the final system contains whatever measures don’t fit, so for pretty much every piece or part, I have to spread out the last few systems to make it look good.
While I am sure that LilyPond can do a better job than Finale in some aspects of initial layout, you must be talking about Finale's default output, before one actually does the page layout. I enjoy the laying out the score exactly as I want it, measure by measure, system by system and page by page to insure the best musical and visual experience for the performer. That includes placing the beginning and ending of sections properly, the best page turns in solo music and parts, and insuring that the last few measures or systems are not orphans that need artificial spreading, among many other things. So much of this takes human intelligence and surely cannot be done by any computer program.
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tisimst
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Re: [Lilypond] Numerous Questions & Thoughts

Post by tisimst »

John Ruggero wrote:While I am sure that LilyPond can do a better job than Finale in some aspects of initial layout, you must be talking about Finale's default output, before one actually does the page layout. I enjoy the laying out the score exactly as I want it, measure by measure, system by system and page by page to insure the best musical and visual experience for the performer. That includes placing the beginning and ending of sections properly, the best page turns in solo music and parts, and insuring that the last few measures or systems are not orphans that need artificial spreading, among many other things. So much of this takes human intelligence and surely cannot be done by any computer program.
I don't disagree with you about wanting the control of laying out the score (and getting a lot of satisfaction from doing it). What gets me, though, is how far ahead LilyPond gets the layout. It's all adjustable, if that's what the user wants. You can put system breaks and page breaks wherever you want and LilyPond will accommodate it. I've been so impressed at how naturally it lays most scores out (not "all", but "most"). For me, it gets me to a better starting point for making detailed adjustments, and sometimes I don't end up making any!

One quick example, which some readers here are likely familiar with.

In the "Casting Off" section of post 11 of Daniel Spreadbury's "Making Notes" blog [1], he features the Edition Peters engraving of Fugue 16 from Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, the G minor BWV 861. The piano score consists of 34 bars on two pages--nothing terribly complicated. Daniel shows a graphic illustrating the high-level page/system/measure outlines of how the major engraving apps do compared to the original hand-engraving:
casting-off-comparison.png
casting-off-comparison.png (541.91 KiB) Viewed 10518 times
In case anyone doesn't know, "Product C" is LilyPond 2.18.2

Here's the actual Edition Peters engraving from IMSLP [2]:
editionpeters-handengraved-bwv861.png
editionpeters-handengraved-bwv861.png (503.5 KiB) Viewed 10518 times
In the above comparison, LP does alright, but could definitely do better. In a more recent build (I regularly use 2.19.36), we can see that the algorithms have gotten better:
lilypond-2.19.36-bwv861.png
lilypond-2.19.36-bwv861.png (244.07 KiB) Viewed 10518 times
Other than some minor layout decisions* with the page titling, this is virtually the default output! I would dare say this is not far off the hand-engraved score. I just hope it is illustrative of how good LilyPond's spacing algorithms can be.

*FULL DISCLOSURE: I manually switched the direction of a few beams, repositioned 4 rests and 1 cross-staff beam, and increased the horizontal space between 2 notes that were too close to each other for my liking. I also increased the vertical space between the staves ever so slightly. Proper voicing took care of the rest. That's about 10 manual tweaks TOTAL. Just saying...

[1] http://blog.steinberg.net/2015/06/devel ... y-part-11/
[2] http://imslp.org/wiki/Das_wohltemperier ... IMSLP22081
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OCTO
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Re: [Lilypond] Numerous Questions & Thoughts

Post by OCTO »

Beautiful!
I wonder if the optical spacing in M26 / RH / beat 1 / voice 2 - is done automatically?
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tisimst
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Re: [Lilypond] Numerous Questions & Thoughts

Post by tisimst »

OCTO wrote:Beautiful!
I wonder if the optical spacing in M26 / RH / beat 1 / voice 2 - is done automatically?
Thanks, OCTO! Yes, the optical spacing is automatic, but can be turned on/off at-will.
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John Ruggero
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Re: [Lilypond] Numerous Questions & Thoughts

Post by John Ruggero »

One would think that these computer programs would show their best in a two page piece like this in even rhythms that doesn't have obvious section endings, and thus where human intelligence is least needed. Despite this, most of them except the Peters and the LilyPond have major errors in layout, the most grievous being placing only two (less packed) measures on the last staff. And the Peters and Lilypond must crowd four measures on a line because they opt for 11 systems instead of 12.

Here is the Bischoff edition, whose spacing I prefer to all of the above. In spite of the footnotes and the fingering, this edition manages to use 12 systems so there are no 4-measure systems, and it positions the two 2-measure systems more pleasingly i.e. not consecutively:
Attachments
Bach Gm Fugue WTC I.pdf
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DatOrganistTho
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Re: [Lilypond] Numerous Questions & Thoughts

Post by DatOrganistTho »

If it is not too late to jump on the bandwagon here:

I came to LilyPond REALLY late. Like, saw it was cool, cost nothing, and instantly got turned off by the programming facade.

I've bought several versions of Finale, even cross-graded over to Sibelius for a couple years, went to MuseScore, then arrived back at Finale, then LilyPond.

What I learned from LilyPond is that its greatest weakness is precisely its greatest ally: text input. Before, I had no idea where I wanted things to land. I can point to several botch jobs of re-engravings done in Finale/Sibelius and I had NO CLUE what I was doing or what I wanted in the score. I thought I was detail oriented, but it wasn't until LilyPond that I learned more about "what" I was writing, and thus learning exactly "how" to write it.

LilyPond taught me to learn what I was doing with my engraving choices. It taught me how to visualize voices, and with precision decide how to put those voices together. I was impotent before I met LilyPond.

Now, that's not to end with "happily ever after..." I had many moments with LilyPond where I wanted to pull my hair out. I did not do what the documentation said I should do, which was to walk through the learning manual slowly and carefully, not moving on to the next part without understanding the previous part.

When I finally did that I thought my eyes where opened.

LilyPond can do literally anything another program can do, and as demonstrated in other places can exceed default outputs and be infinitely customizable.

Lets not forget that if Dorico/Finale/Sibelius can't do something you need it to do, you are stuck. You aren't allowed to modify the program, and there's no place to pay for or request a change/fix and have it done immediately (unless the bug is catastrophic). If LilyPond can't do something, you hands aren't tied; they can get to work on customizing and improving the source or can be donating cash to fix a problem you have.
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