User Profile for Marnen Laibow-Koser

LilyPond 2.10.8-1 (Mac OS X)

Very, very slow under some circumstances.  

I just installed Lilypond 2.10.8. It took something like 10 minutes to compile the test file the first time, although it was faster on subsequent attempts (about 1 minute). Will try 2.11.8 if problem persists.

While I'm writing, I thought I'd take a moment to comment on the quality of Lilypond's music engraving. I'm a professional copyist and composer; I've been using Finale for as long as it's existed. The last time I used Lilypond (version 2.4 or so), I found that there were things (can't recall what now) that were easy to do in Finale, but nearly impossible in Lilypond; the reverse was also true. My impression at the time was that Lilypond was very promising, and quite suitable for certain tasks, but that it was not quite ready to replace Finale. I look forward to seeing if that's still true...I sure would like to save the $100 a year I pay for Finale upgrades, and perhaps replace my iBook with a Linux laptop at some point. As it stands, while I can't get rid of Finale quite yet, Lilypond is an excellent free tool, and should be completely adequate for most uses.

Complaints about the lack of a GUI miss the point, I think. The Lilypond team has only worked on the file format and the rendering engine. It would be possible to make a graphical editor that saves Lilypond files; in fact, there have been a few attempts at this already. The last time I used Lilypond, I was using the command-line interface, and it was quite tedious to do the sort of precise positioning that I'm used to in Finale. But the current IDE seems to make that easier, particularly since the notes in the PDF file are linked to their spots in the source code.

One more thing: it bothers me that Lilypond is being marketed partly through inaccurate comparisons with Finale. Many of the complaints about Finale on the website are dead wrong -- the sample output showed collisions that, with the default settings, Finale would have automatically known to avoid (such as the F and flat sign in m. 13). And this was with Finale 2003...current version is now 2007, and there have been many enhancements along the way. Certainly Finale has its problems, but these are not insurmountable. The decisions of any notation program (including Lilypond) will need some tweaking to produce high-quality output. Software just isn't that smart yet (although Lilypond's default decisions are quite good).

This next remark is controversial and speculative, but I might even go so far as to say that until software can make 100% of the right decisions, there may be a benefit to having it not make 99% of the right decisions. After all, if 99% of the score looks fine, I have to look very carefully for that 1% that needs tweaking (and I may not bother if I'm in a hurry), whereas if 80% of the score looks fine, then I know beforehand that I'm going to have to make a final "tweaking pass" before considering the project done. YMMV.

And the G clef in the Feta font looks ugly and amateurish. I suppose I'll have to use a modified font if I want professional-level output.

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Friday, January 05 2007 @ 09:20 AM PST

A big leap in the wrong direction – and an alternative GUI suggestion.  

So what if they do lack the skills to create a GUI? Any other programmer could create a GUI for Lilypond; in fact, there have already been some attempts along these lines. The Lilypond project is only focusing on the input language and rendering engine. A GUI is explicitly not part of its mission.

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Friday, January 05 2007 @ 09:24 AM PST