Re: Simple question about rests

[a . p . selby]

On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Mats Bengtsson wrote:

> address@hidden wrote:
> > Hello.
> > 
> > I was reading the lilypond example page
> > 
> > http://lilypond.org/stable/examples.html
> > 
> > and looking at the first page of the first example (Petite Ouverture ...)
> > it seems that a rest can have an incorrect vertical position. E.g. in bars
> > 12 and 13 the second quaver (eighth note) rest is in line with the upper
> > note (the A) instead of the lower pair of notes. The rest should be placed
> > out of the way of the A because the A _exists_ at the same time as the
> > rest, but it seems lilypond won't do this unless the other note (the A in
> > this example) actually _starts_ at the same time as the rest.
> 
> I agree that this would be a nice feature. However, handling collisions
> between different voices is a very intricate matter and there will
> always be a number of special cases that cannot be handled
> automatically.
> 
> > [This is slightly surprising because it means that rests are being treated 
> > differently from notes.]
> 
> Of course they are, since rests don't have a prescribed vertical
> position, in contrast to notes.
> 
> 
> > I looked for discussion of this problem, but I couldn't find any in the
> > support mailing lists (perhaps I didn't look properly). It would be nice
> > to know if the problem is due to be fixed or if there is a work-around.
> 
> I hope the main authors of Lilypond put this on the feature request list
> for future versions. If you know some C++ yourself, please feel free to
> try to implement it.
> In the mean time, you can explicitly specify the vertical position of
> each rest, using the \rest command, see
> http://lilypond.org/stable/Documentation/user/out-www/lilypond/Rests.html

Thank you for the very prompt help.

> 
> 
>     /Mats
> 

If you have time, perhaps you could answer a further question. I was
trying to convert a midi file into lilypond, but I couldn't make midi2ly
produce a very good job. The note durations appear wrong because they are
done using '*', there are no rests typset and some notes are ignored 
altogether. Am I using the wrong utility, or using it in the wrong way?
I would be willing to write a better version if there isn't one already, 
but I don't want to waste time writing something if it already exists 
somewhere. 

I think it would be useful to have such a thing because there is a lot of
free midi stuff out there which could then be converted into score form.

Alex