John Link <johnlink <at> nyc.rr.com> writes: > > > A few years ago I was encouraged to try LilyPond as an alternative to Sibelius because LilyPond produced more beautiful scores. I was also told that it would allow me to do things like specify that bars 25 through 32 are to be identical to bars 9 through 16 and avoid cutting and pasting from bars 9-16 into 25-32. I liked what I heard, but I was quite shocked by LilyPond's interface. I would be interested in hearing from any Sibelius users who have successfully learned LilyPond. How can I get going in LilyPond as quickly as possible? > In case it's relevant, I should add that I used to program in FORTRAN and a little bit of UNIX but never in any other languages. > > Thanks in advance, > John Link > > P.S. I sent the message above but I didn't receive it so I'm sending it again. I have seen messages from other users. http://www.cdbaby.com/all/johnlink > http://www.myspace.com/johnlinkproject > > > > > _______________________________________________ > lilypond-user mailing list > lilypond-user <at> gnu.org > https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user >
Hi John, I have been a Sibelius user since the very first version of the software and I still use Sibelius a lot. However, I majored in Systems Engineering before studying music composition and one of the things I liked from that career was programming. This is one of the reasons I like Lilypond so much! Having said that, Sibelius is still faster than Lilypond! I've read a lot of posts where people say that inputing notes is faster in Lilypond but that may be true only if you input a very simple piece of music. It is one thing to typeset a string quartet by Haydn but quite another with an orchestral piece by Stravinsky! Of course, just typing notes in a keyboard may be faster than inputing them with the mouse but the workflow becomes very slow when you have to make all the necessary tweaks to get a nice result. Also, there are lots of different expressions and commands and some of them are very complex. Take for example a tuplet. It requires this expression: \times 2/3 { c8 d e }. It's easy if there are just a few tuplets in the piece, but it gets much more difficult if these occur quite often, even worse if a whole passage, say 10 bars, is comprised only of tuplets! Yes, you can copy and paste the expression but you still have to type the right notes for each tuplet. I'm right now in the process of transcribing an old piece I wrote when I was studying at the Conservatory. It's just 6 minutes long but requires an entire orchestra and it has a very "Stravinskian" style, with constant time signature changes and a lot of chromatism. Thus, it has taken me a lot of time and effort and I'm not even finished after several months! I'm quite sure I would have been able to accomplish the same in Sibelius in just a few weeks (maybe even less) but in Lilypond it seems like forever! (I must say here that I've been using Lilypond for just one year so the slow workflow might as well be because I'm still learning and figuring out the proper ways to do many things) Yet, despite all that, I still like Lilypond, for several reasons: 1. The final score definitely looks better than the output of any other scorewriting software. 2. It's open source! 3. What I said at the beginning: it's like programming, which is something I miss from my first career! 4. It is developed by users for users! It has no commercial interest so it's totallyindependent from a company like Avid making some bad decision like firing all the developers in London, which they did just recently! (We still don't know what will happen with Sibelius in the future...... it might well be terminated, thoug this seems a quite impossible scenario). So one needs a Plan B, just in case!........ I WILL NEVER END USING FINALE (for reasons I will not explain here) Would I recommend Lilypond: of course! But not if you have to do quick jobs! That's why I keep using Sibelius! Regards, Antonio _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user