>> it appears that many people don't know about amadeus. > >There is a good reason for that: it's totally unavailable to >practically everyone. It's an extremely expensive closed-source >product that as far as I know is no longer even sold.
i think i worded my comments very poorly yesterday. >I think the problem here is just that you seem to have started from >the assumption that Lilypond was in fact unique, and been >disappointed when it turned out not to be so. It is unique in the >sense that it's the only tool dedicated to making true >publication-quality engraving available to anyone, but of course it's >not a new idea as software. Neither is Ardour, yet you still manage >to describe that as a revolution on its webpage. indeed, a very fine and appropriately back-atcha comparison. lilypond is certainly just as revolutionary as any of the other tools under development by anyone else here on this list, and for all the same reasons. i think i gave the impression that lilypond bores me or something, when the truth is quite the contrary. i think its an incredible program, and it produces wonderful, wonderful output. when i read an interview about it last year, i was raving to several friends of mine about its potential (we have neighbours who work in the music publishing industry). you are right - i was a little disappointed to find that there was another program that has been around for many years that embodies the same kind of design philosophy as lilypond - its hard to think of other examples like this, where the proprietary-but-ancient tool is the better tool. for text typesetting, TeX was the gold standard that proprietary software has still barely matched. here it seems we have a case where, just as with ardour and other DAW/sequencer tools, the gold standard is a proprietary program (or some combination of them), and open source is on the threshold of offering the same kind of quality and functionality to everyone. so to reiterate, i love lilypond, i think its great and amadeus is not really a viable alternative to it for all the reasons that have been mentioned (cost, lack of availability, etc. etc.) --p
