As a musician, I agree with the recent comment that musicians won't
use Lily in her current state. If I didn't have programming
experience (although my expertise is 20 years out of date), I
wouldn't be able to myself.

However, unlike the recent poster, I do have a (I hope) useful
suggestion - integrate Lily with the many WYSIWYG MIDI sequencers
that are available, via mi2mu. 

Musicians understand and read score notation far better than numbers
or Lily-like codes. (I learned to read music well before I could read
English - that's not unusual.)

Any keyboardist can input music using a MIDI keyboard far faster and
more accurately than with a typewriter keyboard - in my case, more
than 10 times as fast when input error correction is included. Hit
the sequencer quantize function then legato and you have a workable
input to mi2mu within seconds.

Musicians will rely on audio output for proofreading, as I do. It is
very fast to drag a note from one staff to another, kick the
sequencer back a bar, then restart the audio output to check that the
correction has been done right. To remove a note from a Lily voice
and insert it in another once such an error is identified is
extremely slow and indirect, as is the checking that the correction
is correct.

Many musical issues are dealt with very efficiently by standard score
sequencers, especially by the ones that are designed for musicians as
Cubase is - quantizing of note starts and durations, transposition,
time scaling and voicing in particular. It would take a huge amount
of work to make Lily as accomplished in these areas as sequencers
already are - she won't have to do any of it if MIDI files are
integrated into her. It would take much less work to improve mi2mu
the little bit required so that all but the most minor corrections
could be best done by returning to the sequencer, then through mi2mu
to Lily again.

Hope this comes across as positively as I want it to...

John
http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~bf250/harpsichord.html

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