My partner uses this programme regularly and is very fond of it due to the standards it uses (i.e. it produces scores similar to plate-engraved music which are therefore better-looking and easier to read than other well-know notation problems).

Send me a private message if you'd like them to let you into their secrets...

Hmm.  So i tried typesetting a single page of piano music that I had put together in Sibelius  (amounted to seventeen none-too-complex bars; probably should have picked something with some dynamics ).  It took about two hours (maybe a little more) from when I started up the package to input the notes, with maybe three more hours after that just spent fiddling about trying to figure out what I could change.

The approach to notation (not the internal syntax, but the output) seems to be a lot more "professional" than that of some other applications (as seen by the examples on the page I linked to above).  The openness by which they document their methods of type-setting (is that the right word?) is really refreshing.

Having to input all the notes name by name can be a bit of a pain, but it does have it's upsides. But I would never write an extended work in it unless I thought that it was going to be performed by several different performers.  I was also hoping to us it for input/output of programs I was writing, but that didn't quite work out (for reasons not entirely lilypond's fault, I must say).

So here are two bars for comparison.  Lolipop to whoever can guess which is Sibelius 4, and which is Lilypond 2.something



and



There are problems with both of these that I could have fixed manually, but this is pure, unadulterated default output (except maybe that I had to manually drag the bars apart in Sibelius to stop the notes on the upper staff from overlapping in the lower staff).

I found the remark about the even-position of notes with staffs naer one of the pages linked to above to be very interesting (http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/typography-features) , and was wondering if any of the people who use time-space notation would care to offer some views about it?


Programs=problems, eh?  Tell me about it!


MusicXML seems mainly a (messy) notation data format from a quick glance.  Can't say it looks very good. Hmm.    Of course, lilypond, as well as abcplus, both have graphical editors which should in theory make things  a lot easier.  (One nice thing about the text editor for lilypond was that clicking on a note in the rendered file brought you to the code for that note in the source).  The ABC notation seems to differ very little from that of lilypond, and some of the graphical editors   But lilypond seems to have a few more things to do polyphonic writing.  It might be worth quoting the following form their website


That is to say, type-setting is their main concern more than input.  I think I do prefer a lot of things about lilypond's type-setting to Sibelius' (I've not tried Finale ever I think). And given that it's free, I think I'd go with it as a renderer of scores in principle in a lot of cases (I haven't had a chance to check out the quality of the abcPlus renderer in detail, but I suspect it is not as feature-full as lilypond's   ).

My experience of Lilypond (limited as it is) is that even though it may take a while to get usd to it - hence 17 bars taking you 2 hours increpatio - eventually it is a much more economical solution. This is especially true if you are writing either very old or very new music as modern notation programmes are designed to mainly input film scores.
As Lilypond looks at your score as a set of instructions to basically 'run' the image it, it doesn't discriminate against wiggly lines or anything a bit crazy.

I would certainly agree to that if I was inputting something complex.  That page would have probably taken me a little over an hour to work up to that standard anyway.  But yes, I didn't think the two hours to be terribly unpleasant at all (once I had inputted the melodies).  Using the visual editors (or maybe some clever midi-ascii driver ) to enter the notes could make things easier still.