Re: notation apps

[David Bobroff]

> I have recently come across Lilypond, but since I am not a programmer
I am a
> little overwhelmed.  Is there a notation application similar to Finale
or
> Sibelius for the Linux platform?  Any assistance would be greatly
> appreciated.

I'd like to echo some of what has been said about this.  I used Finale
quite happily for some years.  I got involved with using MusiXTeX and
OpusTeX and I also tried out LilyPond a few years ago as well.  Recently
I started looking at LilyPond again and am very glad I did.

I understand that if you are used to a graphic interface it can seem a
bit awkward at first to enter all the notes as a stream of ASCII text. 
It is worth the time spent to get comfortable with this.  The LilyPond
team is doing for music what the LaTeX team is doing for text.

One immediate advantage that I can think of that LilyPond has over
Finale is the ability to make changes in the score and have those
changes propogate to the parts **while maintaining the layout of the
part**.  Maybe Finale can do this now, but I found it was not possible
to save a page layout for each part without extracting the parts, using
up more disk space and losing the ability to correct all parts from one
convenient location.

Using a graphic interface seems to be the natural way to deal with music
as printed music is largely graphic in nature (indeed, up until very
recently, music publishing was done either by manuscript or engraving;
both graphic processes).  But it is really a stream of information. 
LilyPond allows you to input the minimum in order to express that
information.  It ends up being very compact, too.  A particular *.MUS
file I have is 310k.  If I export that to *.ETF it grows to 454k.  If I
then run etf2ly on it the resulting *.ly file is about 34k, or slightly
more than a tenth the size of the original *.MUS file.  The ETF format
is supposed to make the Finale file portable.  It does...between Finale
for Mac and Finale for Windows...as long as the versions match.  A
LilyPond input file will work on any machine that can run LilyPond,
which is any machine that can run a Unix/Linux variant as well as
Windows and MacOSX.  That's a bit more portability than ETF provides.

I know I'm running a bit long winded here but I would like to encourage
the person who originated this thread to give LilyPond a real try. 
Maybe start with one of the GUIs that provide LilyPond output, but the
real power of LilyPond comes from organizing the input files rather than
from being able "to see what you are doing."

Good luck!

-David Bobroff