On Wednesday 21 November 2007, RoLo wrote: > I've been using Finale for notation, I already use it using wine, but > would like to know if you guys can describe the process for composing (I > mean which software you use). I'm just starting to make audio on Linux.
Linux notation software falls into roughly three categories: Rosegarden: There is Rosegarden at the top of my list, because I use it, and have been working there for years. However, I have been thinking about buying a copy of Windows (or a Mac and OS-X) and Finale or Sibelius for years too, so I think I can be pretty fair looking at both sides of our application. There are good things about it, and things I hate, and fixing the things I hate is a never-ending struggle. What makes Rosegarden so hard as a notation package, and so different from anything in the commercial realm, is that it tries to be a true hybrid MIDI sequencer and score editor. It lacks several features considered important by MIDI purists, and it lacks I think even more features important to composers. You can't do proper percussion notation, grace notes have been broken forever, dealing with multiple voices is still unwieldy, it's not possible to do much in the way of staff groupings, or printing certain staffs at different sizes. Several features (segno, coda, different barline types, etc.) are only implemented as unwieldy LilyPond export directives (because adding them as proper native features would have taken vastly, vastly more time, and this is much better than nothing.) Most of all, getting any music to play is much harder with Rosegarden, and it seems to frustrate every new user who intends to use Rosegarden for notation. We are a sequencer too, and we have to be both things, so we just can't make the same sort of compromises that pure notation packages do without fundamentally changing our nature. This means you have to have something of a MIDI user's knowledge of how it all works, even though you just want to pick a damn trumpet out of the list, and have it play a fake trumpet. In the balance of compromises though, one thing we do that nobody else can do is that we (within the limitations of what is possible) are the only application I know of that lets you have crisp, legible notation at the same time as you have a human-sounding, non-mechanical playback performance. We actually keep two different versions of every note, one for playback, and one for display. We also have trigger notes that allow you to write ornaments cleanly, and yet still specify exactly how they are performed. It think it is a really exciting concept, if only we ever had time to really close the last gap, and fill in these remaining limitations. It is MUCH harder to implement something like a DS al Coda inside Rosegarden than it would be in a purely notation-driven application though, and we have been struggling to push the limits of our model for years. We think everything is technically possible, but many of these missing features are so difficult to get right that they remain as yet unfinished. Notation-driven GUI Editors: This is NoteEdit/Canorus (I'm not sure what the status of this project is, or which if either of those is currently under active development) and mScore (the notation spin-off of MuSE.) Both of these are notation-based, rather than MIDI based. You draw a quarter note on a trumpet staff, and the application converts that into a rude MIDI approximation for you. You have little or no control over the MIDI, but you don't have to fuss with so many details, and many things (eg. DS al Coda) are so much easier to implement in this kind of context. I would be a NoteEdit user myself, instead of a Rosegarden developer, but since long ago it has always seemed like the application that ought to feel most suitable for my purposes, and yet didn't actually work out. I've never managed to accomplish anything with it, I'm afraid. I wound up putting my money on Rosegarden, even with all its other, different frustrations. Plus Rosegarden has IMHO a vastly more friendly notation entry interface. mScore is/was supposed to be patterned after Sibelius. It builds a soft synth into itself, and comes bundled with a soundfont, so you never have to worry about noise problems. When I last looked at this, it seemed very promising, but very rudimentary and not yet really usable for anything at all. I haven't looked at it in quite some time, but Ubuntu Feisty doesn't have any packages (of this or Canorus either one), so I don't take this as an encouraging sign that it has come a long way in the last while. LilyPond: LilyPond renders very good notation using a kind of text scripting language. It's hard to imagine anything further from Finale than LilyPond, but I think LilyPond's output looks MUCH better than any other computer-generated notation I've seen. They have put a great deal of effort into producing beautiful notation, and they have succeeded in large measure. The problem with LilyPond is you have to learn a complicated language to make full use of it. LilyPond front-ends: For the user who wants to avail herself of the beauty of LilyPond without the foreign language aspects, it is possible to use graphical front-ends. Thanks especially to Heikki Junes, Rosegarden now does such a good job of exporting to LilyPond that we are making it the only print engine in the near future. Somewhere in the middle is Denemo, which is a graphical front-end that's aimed at someone who understands the underlying LilyPond syntax, and who wants a helper. It's kind of like Rosegarden is the OpenOffice.org of LilyPond. It's a quasi WYSIWYG editor that doesn't produce very nice LilyPond code. Denemo is more of a Bluefish kind of editor that helps someone who knows HTML write code more easily. That's kind of a nutshell summary. Actually, this message is just expansive enough that I feel like I ought to go back and do a better job all around, or I should have made it much shorter. It almost suggests we need some kind of notation HOWTO with links and comparative up to date reviews of the current state of all these applications. (I settled on Rosegarden in 2002, and I haven't paid more than token attention to anything else since then, but I don't want to come off like all these other projects are worthless. They're not. Though I do have doubts about whether any of the other projects are actually as usable as Rosegarden yet. We ALL have problems, but I think Rosegarden is the most finished in the spectrum of half-complete offerings.) -- D. Michael McIntyre -- Ubuntu-Studio-users mailing list Ubuntu-Studio-users@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-studio-users
