Re: Time

[Graham Percival]

On 14-Jun-04, at 9:40 PM, Joshua Koo wrote:
> I was browsing around the mutopia-project and I saw this piece, F. 
> Chopin: Prelude (Op. 28, No. 1) for Piano, by Donald Axel.
> The shock for me was for just about a page of music, there's about 
> over 800 lines in the lilypond source.

I haven't seen the lilypond source nor the finished product, but it was 
probably well-spaced out, with lots of tweaking to make it look better. 
 Chopin piano music tends to have lots of articulations, fingering, 
slurs, and such material.

I wouldn't be surprised if one person used 800 lines for one page of 
Chopin piano music, but only 80 lines for one page of easy Bach piano 
music.

> The 1st piece I typeset in lilypond took me about 4 hours. I use much 
> of Noteworthy Composer before and it usually took me 2 hours at most 
> to complete a piece.

The more you use lilypond, the faster it'll be -- the same is true of 
other programs, of course.  How much experience do you have with 
Lilypond, and how much do you have with Noteworthy Composer?

> Well, so the question is how fast does the other lilypond users can 
> typeset piece? To set a benchmark, lets say the time to typeset for 
> just a single instrument, single voice for about 2 pages, 120 bars.

That's too vague:
1)  How many articulations?  Dynamics?  Slurs?  Fingerings?
2)  Do we care how the finished product looks?  Do we need to be 
concerned about a collision between a slur and expression marking?  Do 
we need to worry about page turns, or making sure the music doesn't end 
with one line on a final page of the score?  (presumably not, since 
this example is only two pages)
3)  How complicated are the rhythms?  whole notes to 8ths?  16ths?  
triplets?  rests?
4)  Does the part jump around, or are all intervals within a 5th?

The only way to judge a race between Lilypond and Finale (or between 
various Lilypond users) would be to have a set example (say, a pdf) 
that everybody copies out.