On 9 Nov 2005 at 0:11, Mark D Lew wrote: > On Nov 5, 2005, at 11:42 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote: > > > This will definitely be of interest to anyone interested in > > MusicXML, manuscript-style music fonts, or Clinton Roemer's book, > > "The Art of Music Copying": > > Way back in the early 1990s, when I first started using Finale (after > having tried Lime before that), what I really wanted was a system in > which the input would be like LaTeX. I had done years of typesetting > in the pre-desktop days, and entering coded text seemed the most > natural thing to me. > > That probably says a lot about my preferred way of using Finale....
Has anyone looked at Lilypond? I downloaded it last week and installed it, but for some reason, the GUI won't run. The installation instructions on the Lilypoind website seem to be completely bollixed up, as they seem to apply to a previous version of the program. This is the kid of thing that drives me crazy about open source, when even someone as technically savvy as *me* can't figure out how to make it work. Personally, I'm not interested in doing layout in XML or text. I can see note entry with text, but I do remember how hard Score's entry was, where you put in notes in one pass, rhythm in another and so forth, and had to make sure you had the same number of entries in both lists, and it was a pain to fix it after you'd entered it (at least, so far as I could tell -- it wasn't as easy as simply editing the text you'd already entered). I think XML is a horrid format for human beings to look at data, to be honest. Well, that's not entirely true. For a data file with 20 records and 10 fields, it's pretty easy to read. But for something as complex as music, where there are all sorts of inter-related XML structures, I can't imagine it being easy to do. And I definitely want a GUI for page layout. Anything else would be masochistic. In short, I don't think Finale and Sibelius have anything to worry about from these open source projects. For me, the only advantage of them is the capability to run them behind a web page to produce notation on the fly. And even that has pretty limited application. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
