The Case for Music Notation

Opensource music notation editors kind of suck. I'm not talking about the typesetting software, Lilypond, but the GUI interface I so desire.

Lilypond is much like Latex, except much harder. Just think about it, in Latex, the most you'll ever do is to put in text, some formulas, and a few graphs. With music notation, you have to worry not only about the notes, there's also the text describing the notes, other notations such as cresendos, and ornaments. Besides, Latex has the great interface of Lyx to work with, Lilypond has ... well....

Since I'm using Linux with Openbox, I really don't want to get the KDE based software. Also, there's the requirement that it outputs to Lilypond. The reason for only using Lilypond outputable software is that Lilypond can easily be intergrated within Latex, the typesetting software of my choice.

I tried out Musescore, it didn't work too hot. For one, it failed to install a few times. So did Denemo at first, but Musescore's interface just didn't click with me. Denemo's on the other hand worked pretty well... at first. After typing in the solo from Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol, the slurs didn't come out.

Well, they DID come out, but they weren't at the right spot even though the GUI showed that they were there. Ten minutes of tweaking did nothing. I gave up soon.

Another hitch is that there's no good Mac editor. There's Caranous, which is in early beta (looks promising though) so I don't intend to try it until its fully there. So basically, there's nothing there. :-/

I better start learning Lilypond then...

-runiteking1

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