Lilypond did it for me

[darius]

This is the kind of comment one enjoys writing. 

I've been an enthousiast user of Lilypond for over two years now,
and the last piece I worked on is a cimbalom (Typical hungarian
instrument) concerto I write for an excellent friend  of mine,
named Ernest Bango, and who is a world class cimbalom player.

I write this comment to celebrate the end of the journey. This concerto
has taken almost a full year of work. Yesterday was the first rehearsal. I was
not allowed to attend (the orchestra wanted to rehearse once or twice 
without the scrutiny of the "composer") but I got numerous compliments
about the quality of the scores. 

Even more importantly, while Lilypond provides numerous hacks to improve
the way its scores look, what the orchestra got from me is basically the
raw, untouched output. I'm not so fanatic about typesetting. I'd rather have
a system which is over 90% correct automatically, rather than spend ages 
trying to get it closer to 100%. I must say, that Lilypond' output,
together with lilypond-book, is more than good enough as is. At least
to me. And the orchestra.

Using Lilypond has been a constant source of pleasure, the mailing list
provide world class support and understanding for everybody's own biases.
Thank you all, Jan, HW and Mats and all the others that contribute 
to the list's content, thank you for paying attention to tons
of details - such as making the cygwin install painless and efficient,
such as making the system stable and reliable, such as ... (there is no 
end to it).

I guess there is more to say, such as how long the piece is (around 30')
how long it takes to produces all the scores (around 11'). I use M4
for conditional compilation to address the idiosyncracies of midi-generation
(in other words, some things in the score looks good and sound awful,
some things do it the other way around). I also use M4 to produce two
Midi files to overcome the limitation of 15 tracks. M4 is also
used to produce separate tracks 
for pizz, staccato, and solo violin/viola/cello/bass when generating midi 
so that I can attach
separate instruments to each track and have it all sound correct.

(These midi files are then plugged into cubase for the final rendering
phase, so that I can provide demos - or even karaoke-like tracks for
the various instruments. Very typically, I *never* even touch the
generated midi files manually, beside the M4 stuff described above.)

Well, that's about it. 

Thank you all. It's been a fantastic year.

Darius.