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.
wess-music wrote:
In other words - I do appreciate the real things in this life that bring aesthetically approach to our souls.
Does the work with the Lilypond deliver such kind of pleasure of going through the touch of every element?
The sound of the music is the real thing of beauty for me, but its visual depiction can be beautiful and (more important) easily read. The fewer neurons it takes performers to read their music, the more they have to spare for the interpretation.