James Harkins <[email protected]> writes: > David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org> writes: > >> It's been some time since I last tried, but the basic answer I arrived >> at for myself was "don't bother". The tools are not good enough right >> now to save time. > > I have to agree with David here. > > When I first started looking at LilyPond, one of my first questions was > about MIDI input. But then I realized: > > - I would have used MIDI for step input (hold a note, press a key for > the rhythmic value). So, which is faster? Reaching for another > keyboard to hold down, say, F and type 2, or just to type "f2" on one > keyboard? Seemed to me that it would be faster to stick with one > keyboard (the computer keyboard).
Well, add to that reasonably good rhythm detection so that you basically just need to put in the bar checks and your input tool corrects its conceptions accordingly. Or make a completely separate input pass just for entering the durations. Or combine them, and update the guesses based on the specified durations. There are a number of ways in which one can imagine an actually helpful way of working with a separate Midi input, or even with abusing the computer keyboard itself as a Midi keyboard approximation. And then there is the question of how convenient your editing tools make it to pull apart something like a Midi performance of a piano concerto into the kind of voicing you need for making LilyPond happy with the music. That's not the ordinary cut&paste support. If I have something like wrongly chorded expressions, how to cut out selected notes in chords and then paste them out into a separate voice? That's something that Emacs' LilyPond mode could conceivably be extended to do with a reasonable degree of comfort, and of course it's a nice challenge for something like Frescobaldi as well. It's not strictly related to Midi, but this sort of editing task is more likely to occur with Midi-based workflows. Anway, my point is: the currently available tools are not good enough right now to save time. I'm not saying that this means the idea is doomed. I think that would be a sour grapes stance. But at the current point of time, the only convincing reason I see for working with Midi input is if you plan on improving the available tools, and in that case, full speed ahead! -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
