Re: Ancient template & MIDI question & bug?

[Juergen Reuter]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, Matevz Jekovec wrote:

> Hello to all!
>
> I'm typesetting a few Gallus motets using the ancient.ly template for my
> work. I encountered some problems:

Hello,

I think there is no ancient.ly file in the distribution, but I guess you 
are referring to the mensural music transcription example in Sect. 3.5.1 
of the Lily 2.6 documentation, right?

> 1) The MIDI instrument is an annoying drumkit and I'm not able to find a
> way to change it, no matter where I place \set Staff.midiInstrument =
> ... line.

Mmh, don't know, sounds like a bug, independent of ancient notation... 
(Han-Wen/Jan?)

> 2) Is there a way the incipit isn't played in .midi file?

Good point.  AFAIK, this is not natively possible.  But it should be 
possible to use the skip music feature in combination with the tag feature 
for that purpose (untested!):

Add a \skip command to the incipit, such that the incipit is skipped; but 
tag the \skip, and keep/filter it out in the score/MIDI block, such that 
lily considers the \skip only when generating MIDI.

The long-term idea is to automatically generate the incipit by passing the 
affected music to a scheme function that unfolds the music twice, once 
as incipit by tweaking a lot of properties, and another time untweaked as 
part of the ordinary score.  However, this scheme function has not yet 
been implemented.

> 3) Using \override Score.SpacingSpanner #'spacing-increment less than
> 1.0, results in some wierd horizontal offsets after the incipit - the
> first beat notes aren't right after the measureline, but after a, say
> 1/4 of measure width. So there is an annoying blank space between every
> measureline and first note in measure.

Yes, this is AFAICS related to a known general problem when using lily's 
spacing engine for ancient-like notation that also applies to Gregorian 
chant notation and Mensural notation, resulting in too much horizontal 
space between (long) notes.  In this special case, please note that in the 
template there are additional invisble notes ("\skip 1*1") that are used 
as a workaround (or rather a hack) to compensate for various alignment 
bugs (see the comments in the template for explanation); I guess these 
skips contribute to your problems.  Things have changed since the template 
was written for 2.0 or so; hence, you also could try if you can live 
without these skips.  Apart from that, the only advice that I can give is 
to juggle around with all horizontal spacing related properties such as 
shortest-duration-space, spacing-increment, base-shortest-duration, 
common-shortest-duration, packed, raggedright.

Greetings,
Juergen

> Using LilyPond 2.6.3.
>
>
> Regards.
> - Matevž