Jeremy Brown wrote:I'm still fundamentally more interested in producing sequenced music than making nice, pretty sheet music. So I'm not really interested in Sibelius for visual reasons (e.g. it has this or that particular notation symbol, or it has nice typesetting). The main reason I like Sibelius is just note entry and editing.
I know plenty of people use the Cakewalk and Cubase notation editors
on a daily basis and are happy with this, but I also know that at
least some people find them tedious and difficult to use, too (I fit
into this category). From messing around with Rosegarden it seems
like the Rosegarden notation editor most closely resembles that of
Cubase. Is there any intent to extend on this, or are most people
happy with it as is?
I don't think anyone's entirely happy with it as is. Notation is obviously pretty tough to do, and there are compromises all the way once you start trying to mix notation and performance data. I am certainly interested in continuing to improve it though.
To a great extent of course it all depends on what it is about a
program like Sibelius that you find more satisfactory than one like
Cubase. There are plenty of possibilities: feature-related pure
notation aspects such as support for particular symbols or more
precise positioning control; usability aspects such as ease of note
entry or ability to do first-cut notation from performance data;
quality of printed output, and so on.
I can give examples of a few things I find more intuitive about Sibelius. For example, I like the fact that when you click on an existing note in Sibelius, the appropriate note duration is highlighted in the toolbar, and you're able to change the length of the note in the staff by clicking on another note duration in the toolbar. Also, I have a difficult time positioning notes in a measure when the measure contains a whole rest. Sibelius lets you click on the whole rest and break it into a series of half, quarter, eight, etc. rests by clicking on a particular note duration. For me, this is a lot easier than having some sort of "snap to grid" option where the user specifies the duration of each tick in the grid, then tries to insert his note at the correct tick.
Granted, I don't *have* to have any of these features to be able to edit notes. But one you familiarize yourself with them they kind of become second nature, and when you use another piece of notation editing software (like Cakewalk or Cubase) it becomes painfully obvious that they don't exist.
There are certain things that will always be harder for us inI realize Rosegarden is supposed to be sequencing software, and I definitely think focusing on the notation aspects of the software and throwing everything else to the wind would be a poor decision. For me, the notation editor is just a way of getting my musical ideas into the system, so that they can be rendered into nice-sounding music by my MIDI device.
Rosegarden because of the need to permit the user to edit the raw
performance data as well as the notation. For example, features
like performable ornaments are pretty damn difficult (although
nonetheless on the to-do list), and we have some rather basic
limitations at the moment like the fact that beams cannot cross
bar lines (not a fundamental limitation, just a problem when
managing the rendering phase) or staffs (more fundamental) and
that we don't even have repeats yet because we're (OK, I'm) mired
in indecision about how they should integrate with playback. Also
there is not yet any support for multi-voice staffs, etc., though
again that's feasible and planned.
I saw these. It looks like progress is being made though.If you saw my earlier post about printing from Rosegarden vs. printing from Lilypond (using data exported from Rosegarden), you'll have noticed that we aren't in any hurry to make Rosegarden able to do true typeset-quality layout natively, either.
Probably a lot of small changes. The fundamental way you edit existing notes seems to be a little weird...I've only been able to do it by deleting the old notes and adding new ones (but I may have just missed some feature that's already present). Both of the Sibelius features I mentioned above could be integrated into the existing Rosegarden notation editor as is...and I think this is true of most of the note entry features I like about Sibelius. They're just extensions on top of the standard Cakewalk/Cubase/Rosegarden style notation editor.None of this is quite as negative as it may sound -- there is an awful lot of capability already in the code, and it certainly will only get better.
So, what in particular did you have in mind?
I guess the best thing for me to do at the moment would be to start familiarizing myself with the Rosegarden source code and structure.
Any comments or opinions?
Jeremy
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