on 2013-08-08 at 14:16 Urs Liska wrote: > What could be useful however (I don't know _anything_ about it) would be > to add a chapter to the documentation talking about how to get > high-quality audio output from/through LilyPond, referencing useful free > soundfonts or whatever is useful to get this to work.
the quality of the soundfonts will naturally make a difference. but i think it's more important to have a good midi to begin with. last time i tried it, the midi output generated by lilypond was very basic, just pitches and durations. IIRC, velocity is fixed at 127, and dynamic is mapped to changes in volume. so basically you get everything played ffff with someone turning up and down the volume knob of the radio... in my opinion, even with the best soundfonts in most situations you'll only get a very crude rendering. i haven't been following too closely the development of notation/composing applications for windows and mac, but i've seen enough to know that their rendering engines are *far* more complex than sending basic midi messages to a couple of good soundfonts. packages like the garritan orchestra or the eastwest collections are huge beasts where not only the quality (and sheer quantity) of the sound samples is important, but also the ability to properly interpret dynamics (including things like crescendo or decrescendo during a note), legato, staccato and all kinds of articulations, tremolos, trills, different playing techniques, etc, etc. just listen to some of the demos here, and if you can stand the horrible music, you'll see (hear, that is) what i mean: http://www.soundsonline.com/Symphonic-Orchestra browsing through the manual can also be revealing: http://www.soundsonline-forums.com/docs/EW-QL_Orchestra_Manual.pdf in short, you need both: - a complex midi sequence, with all kinds of CC messages to represent all the information involved in musical notation besides the notes, - a *very* complex rendering system, to properly interpret all those messages. that's what people who buy those things pay hundreds of $$$ for. i guess that lilypond midi output could be somewhat improved, and with some further tweaking in a dedicated midi sequencer and a good soundfont you can get reasonable results for simple music. but if you want to talk about "high-quality audio output", that's something different. and i don't think lilypond will ever compete there, because LP is a *notation* software, and Finale is not. _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user