Hi Adam I am not able to answer all of your questions, I just want to suggest, that you also include Lilypond in your search for an editor. Like MusiXTeX it uses a text-based input which it subsequently compiles to a score.
Regards Stig Junge ----- Original Message ----- From: "Siska Ádám" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, July 22, 2006 6:09 PM Subject: [TeX-music] Sibelius or Finale vs. MusiXTeX -- which to choose? Hello, I'm a hungarian composer student and I'm looking for a professional score editor software instead of the one I'm using at this moment, and I would be very glad if someone on this list could help me in my decision. The two most frequently used score typesetters are Sibelius and Finale, but as a LaTeX-user (I wouldn't say I'm a TeXpert, but I use simple LaTeX for 3 years for typeset normal text documents), I don't like very much the WYSWYG editors, so I would really like to use MusiXTeX, if it can deal with the problems that contemporary music typesetting holds. But after reading the documentation of T.113 (July 30, 2005), I got a bit disappointed. My first impression was that it would be almost impossible to typeset not only contemporary scores, but classical ones written after 1900 too (like for example Stravinsky's Threni, or the Cello concerto of the recently died Ligeti). But because I REALLY want to use something related to TeX for typesetting my own scores, I thought I'll write some questions to this list, to see clearly if I misunderstood things while reading the documentation or not. Of course I don't need at this moment a "correct" answer (that means, a long answer saying how to solve the given problem), only something like "yes, this can be solved" or "no, forget to use MusiXTeX if you want to do such things". Thank you. My first and maybe most important question is: how many staffs can I use in a score? In the documentation there was a limit of 9 instruments, which is a very hard limitation. This limit has been reached centuries ago (for example, in the motet "Spem In Allium" by Tallis there are 40 voices), and my biggest orchestral piece up to now was written for 22 instruments (some of them with more than one staff), so I would be in a deep trouble if I couldn't use more than 9 instruments. The question is related to the instrument groups, too. I saw that there's a restriction of 3 instrument groups at the same time, which is extremely slight. This number could be easily exceeded already in a baroque score (for example, in Bach's cantatas or passions)... The other thing that was not clear for me, if I could insert graphical elements in the score. Specially, I don't know if I can draw a free line within the staff (what normally is used to indicate that the player should play free notes), or if I can put some notes from several staffs (staffs that are close to each other, of course) in a squared or circled box (this is normally used when some instruments have notes that should be repeated undefined times while the rest of the orchestra is playing), or things like these. The next question is: what happens, if I need to use a musical symbol that is not included in the MusiXTeX fonts? (For example, I hadn't find the 1/4 note flat and 1/4 note sharp symbols, nor the symbol indicating a cluster to be played, etc.). It is not clear, that how could I typeset music with non-diatonic scales, because of the signature setting method of MusiXTeX (\setsign and \generalsignature commands). This is not a real problem for typeset contemporary music (because signatures are no longer used, since they lost their meaning), but if I want for some reason (let say, because I must write an analysis or anything) typeset scores from classical composers like Bartók, I can have problems with this system because there are scores where I must put a sharp and a flat signature in the same staff (for example, when you use the spectral scale based on C, you usually write F sharp and B flat as signature, so you have a sharp and a flat in the same staff at the same time). Or sometimes composers used signatures like one flat, but instead of putting it to B, they put it on A. There is an other problem with the font and paper sizes. The biggest score I've ever seen in my life is Peter Eötvös's Psychokosmos, typesetted for paper of size A2, but the usually papersize that everybody uses in orchestral typesetting is the A3 paper. I know that in LaTeX there are problems if someone want to use so big papers, and therefore I have the question: what about MusiXTeX? Can I use the normal A3 paper for writing my scores? And what about the font sizes? For example if I have, let's say, 22 instruments, and I want 2 systems in every page (that is 44 staffs and margins and the space between systems), can I set the font size to something enough small? I have three other questions related to staffs. The first: can I put an "ossia" somewhere in the score? That means: can I put a small staff that begins in the middle of the line, and maybe ends before the end of the same line? The second: can I change the number of staffs used by an instrument inside a line? (For example, if I have 5 flutes in 5 different staffs, but suddenly the 1-2-3 and 4-5 begin playing together, so that I'd need only 2 staffs from that point -- I saw this for example in the Eötvös piece mentioned above.) The third is: if someone writes an orchestral score, there may be only few times when the full orchestra is playing, and most of the time there may be instruments with very long pauses. In this cases the scores normally only include in each system the instruments that are actually playing in that system. Since MusiXTeX does the the system-breaks automatically (which is in fact a very powerful feature), does it care on this very important thing, or I'll get scores with a lot of instruments full of pauses? And related to the automatic system-breaking: I read that the system breaks are done at the bars, which is normal in old musics, but what happens if a score doesn't have any bar? My last and maybe very easy-to-answer question is, that which is the biggest score size that can be managed with MusiXTeX? My biggest score up to now (the above mentioned piece for 22 instruments) had 51 pages in A4 format, but a normal orchestral score can easily have 70-80 pages in A3 format (I'm not talking now about pieces like Stockhausen's Inori, which has more than 200 pages in A3 paper). So if I want to write orchestral music, do I have the chance for build scores with lots of pages? (I know that there's no restriction, but I don't know if the compiler breaks down or not building so big things.) Thank you very much for your answers, Adam ________________ Siska Ádám +36 (70) 207-63-85 http://apocalypse.rulez.org/~sadam _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [email protected] http://icking-music-archive.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [email protected] http://icking-music-archive.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
