Adam and all,
I had the same intuition as you seem to have had: TeX would seem
the best
fit for non-standard music notation. Well, MusiXTeX is absolutely
the worst.
Finale and Sibelius make every exception a painful process, but at
least you
can do them! For any exception in MusiXTeX, you have to go read and
modify
the TeX program itself---way too hard for what it's worth.
You (and music typesetters in general) could have a look at
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77garcia.pdf (an
article with
some comments on these issues) and after that at
http://www.fedegarcia.net/TeX/TeXmuse.html.
Between Finale and Sibelius, there's not many criteria (they are
different,
but ultimately the same; it's like WordPerfect vs. Word). Sibelius
has been
colonizing everything: more and more publishers are requiring the
pieces to
be typeset with it to be considered, for example. If you are new to
both,
the most practical choice is probably Sibelius. But I keep using
Finale
because that's what I learned and don't want to learn something new.
Best,
Federico Garcia
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Sibelius or Finale vs. MusiXTeX -- which to choose?
(Mogens Lemvig Hansen)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2006 13:42:39 -0700
From: "Mogens Lemvig Hansen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [TeX-music] Sibelius or Finale vs. MusiXTeX -- which to
choose?
To: "TeX-music mailing list" <[email protected]>
Message-ID:
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reply-type=original
Hi all,
I think Adam asks brilliant questions (see below).
MusiXTeX and friends need some marketing materials answering these
(and
more) questions. In other words, a single web page explaining in some
technical detail what MusiXTeX can do. The manual explains _how_
which
makes it too long for this purpose.
Does any such marketing material exist?
Regards,
Mogens
----- Original Message -----
From: "Siska Adam" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, July 22, 2006 9:09 AM
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 Bartsk, 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 Evtvvs'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 Evtvvs 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 Adam
+36 (70) 207-63-85
http://apocalypse.rulez.org/~sadam
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