First impressions (Was: Rolls and Ruffs)

[Peter Mogensen]

Hi,

I've now half way through my first real Lilypond score. I mostly arrange 
music for marching bands consisting of flutes and drums and a small 
brass section.
Here's my first impressions. The files are at:
http://www.bigendian.dk/owts.tgz

Comments are welcome.

* Lilypond is definitely faster to use than MusiXTeX. When you have the
  basic layout, typing the notes are faster than any GUI program.

* The documentation lacks a good explanation of different context and
  the meaning of different ways of nesting them.

* There's still too many hacks involved. Typing the above score I ran
  into the following problems.

  - representing snare drum notes. (Ruffs, rolls and flams). The current
    layout is acceptable, but the it's a hack. It would be better if
    Lilypond knew the correct musical concept.
    Tremolos in ruffs and rolls should not be aligned with beams.
    It's annoying that grace notes needs to be phantom duplicated in
    other voiced in repeats, but I can see that's a know bug. Anyway,
    the period between the to beats of a flam is so short that grace
    notes doesn't give the correct timing.

  - ties and slurs should carry over into alternatives.

  - Ideally you should only write each peace of information 1
    time. However, there's as far as I can see no silver bullet to do
    this with LilyPond. If I want "Da CAPO al FINE" (I do), where should
    I write it so it's only written once and it's present in every print
    of a single voice, but only present once in the full score?

  - btw... LilyPond should know of repeating by "dal segno/da capo".

  - I know I probably should have typed everything in the sounding key,
    but it was easier for me to just type each instrument as it is
    written and manipulate afterward. It doesn't give the correct key in
    the midi output.

  - I had to upgrade to 2.3.1 to make one line staffs work better. I
    still get a lot of warnings which I don't know why.

  - MIDI for percussion doesn't seem to work.


Ok... LilyPond is great, but could be better. I hope I'll find some time
to contribute.

regards,
Peter