On 05-Apr-99 David B.Teague wrote: > On Mon, 5 Apr 1999, Marcus Claren wrote: >> Subject: Good notation program for linux > >> Does anybody know of a good music writing program for linux, >> preferrably deb - packaged? > > Hi Marcus: > > I too need a program that will notate music as well as > something that will take files from that notation and > create MIDI files, and play them. > > I looked in the the Packages.gz files from the Debian > Potato distribution. There many programs that refer to music. > Some of these in .../dists/potato/contrib/... are > musiclyr pmx > > In .../dists/potato/main/... some are > lillypond abc2ps abcmidi rosegarden > > In .../dists/potato/non-free/... some are > abc2mtex musixtex opustex > > I hope this helps, and if you decide to use one of these > I'd like to know which one, and how well it does the job.
Musixtex is a pure printing program and is capable of doing a fine job, just as raw TeX is capable of fine text printing. However, creating the input by hand would be for the masochistic. Better would be to use a front-end which can do musixtex output. Rosegarden has a nice GUI and can produce musixtex, opustex and (if I'm not mistaken) pmx output. However, Rosegarden's musical repertoire is not complete nor always correct; there is a new version under development but progress is currently VERY slow (since the developers have other things on their plates). Rosegarden can also produce MIDI output, within its limitations. At present, my preferred program for scoresheet printing is MUP (see http://www.arkkra.com ). It has no GUI, so you type in text codes for the music, but this is compact and fairly intuitive, and easily editable. The printed output (PostScript) is superb (or can be made so); its good scoresheet formatting is transparent and involves no detailed input from the user unless some non-standard layout is required. I have encountered almost no serious limitation to what it can print (except possibly piano reductions of polyphonic music: it is limited to two "voices" per stave which may frustrate you in this context. Although each "voice" can consist of chords, it is not the same). However, since the source code is equally available, you could try making changes to implement more than 2 voices per stave; but I have to confess that my few attempts to do this have shown that the exercise is more complicated than it looks ... It can also generate MIDI output. Its "default" MIDI does not sound very exciting; it has MIDI directives which, I guess, a MIDI-knowledgeable user could use to improve that, but I'm not so can't comment. MUP is shareware: to register a copy (and get a key to enable removal of the "Unregistered Copy of MUP" watermark from everything it prints) you should (and I have been happy to) send the authors $25. Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 05-Apr-99 Time: 21:42:06 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
