On Sep 23, 2011, at 9:38 PM, Seth Williamson wrote:
> This has all been very interesting. But almost nobody addressed my main
> question. Namely, are there any, or many, pros out there who have chosen
> LilyPond over Sibelius or Finale? I did appreciate hearing from Kieran
> MacMillan.
>
I have been in the music biz for 10ish years and I have only seen this choice
being made recently with a handful of editors on the French lilypond mailing
list. If you consider the clergy music professionals (I do insofar as the
music they're typesetting is linked to their vocation), you can add a few more
from this list.
For the majority of my professional musicking years, I didn't even know
LilyPond existed. So, I would guess that the majority of people have not made
this choice because they do not know if LilyPond exists, and if they did know,
they wouldn't make the switch because of the cost in time of learning a new
program and changing all of one's documents over to a new format.
> Somebody said there have been 2 million downloads of MuseScore. Does anybody
> know if MuseScore is gaining many former LilyPond adherents? I know for a
> fact that my girlfriend definitely prefers it.
>
I would not be surprised if MuseScore's usage has already eclipsed that of
LilyPond and if some LilyPond users move over to MuseScore. I am almost
positive that Finale and Sibelius combined dwarf the usage of SCORE. They do
different things. I see LilyPond evolving towards something like SCORE with
easier input syntax and more features, and I think MuseScore will eventually be
able to perform at the same level as Finale and Sibelius.
The scenario you described before of a group of arrangers around computers
making changes on the fly under time pressure could never work with LilyPond in
its current state - it needs to recompile a score every time to get the
horizontal spacing right. Furthermore, the people working in these groups
likely feel much more comfortable with a WYSIWYG interface - it is certainly
better for error checking, which likely counts much more than correct spacing
and collisions of fermatas with slurs in time crunches.
Cheers,
MS
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