On 04/07/2016 07:04 PM, Silas Mortimer wrote:

> If I might ask, because I've been wondering about this, what makes
> doing notation so difficult?

I think the root of it is because notation is a very analog, 
infinitely-variable kind of thing that is difficult to represent and 
manipulate in an orderly digital world.

I have probably over 1,000 pages of commercially published sheet music 
for various instruments sitting around in my house, and it probably 
wouldn't take me 30 seconds to find a score that Rosegarden can't be 
used to reproduce.  It would probably take me more on the order of 30 
minutes to find a score that Rosegarden CAN reproduce exactly like the 
original, with no compromises.  I would probably have to pull that out 
of some basic band method book too.

Notation is difficult, because of the amount of effort that would be 
required to address any random one of a hundred different scenarios I 
could come up with that Rosegarden doesn't know how to handle.

Kneed beams.  How the hell would we ever make kneed beams work without 
seriously rethinking everything from the ground up?  I have utterly no idea.

Anacrusis is something I've banged on off and on for years, and we still 
can't really handle it probably, or get it exported to LilyPond 
properly.  Close, but not really a cigar.  I have a trumpet method book 
with 1,000 pages of stuff Rosegarden can't handle.  It's basic, common 
stuff that's hard to work out how to achieve in a notation editor 
grafted onto a MIDI sequencer.

After 15 years of this, I could go on for days, Silas.  Doing notation 
on top of a sequencer is borderline insanity, but it's a crazy kind of 
fun to challenge the limits of what is possible, even if it isn't smart 
or practical.

The true notation editors like MusE Score and Finale (they work directly 
with notes and lines and staffs instead of MIDI) have an easier time 
with a great many of these problems, but they face their own nightmares. 
  Those things are especially weak when it comes to rendering imperfect 
human performances on a page.  I've seen absolutely nothing on any 
platform in close to 30 years of computer music that could produce a 
playable sheet of music without a considerable amount of fiddling around 
to tweak all the glitches.

I'm pretty sure if that magic button could be written, it would be on 
the market by now, and would probably cost $10,000 a copy.

-- 
D. Michael McIntyre

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Rosegarden-user mailing list
[email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-user

Reply via email to