Re: lilypond

[Daniel Johnson]

Bohdan Krowicky wrote:

> These days I'm a composer and I use Sibelius 4 as a composition tool,  
> and the thought of learning a new language is rather daunting. Can  
> Lilypond accept a Midi file and convert it into its own format, and  
> then to its beautiful printed output? Do composers use Lilypond as  
> their primary work system? It seems to me that one needs to have a  
> piece already written, on paper perhaps, and then input it to your  
> program. Or am I off track here?

You can use midi2ly to convert a (quantized) midi file to Lilypond, but 
you're guaranteed to have to make many many tweaks on the Lilypond end 
to get it to display acceptably.  If you are converting existing 
Sibelius files to Lilypond, though, this will probably save you quite a 
bit of time.

For Finale users, you can use etf2ly to convert Finale's ETF export 
format to lilypond.  There are similar converters for ABC (abc2ly) and 
MUP (mup2ly).  I don't know of any Sibelius converters.  These will 
convert more of the music information than midi2ly, but you will 
certainly need to do lots of work on the Lilypond file in order to get 
it to look OK.

Additionally, there have been a number of issues reported with running 
these programs under Windows (they require installation and extra 
configuration of a Python environment).  They work fairly well on Linux, 
though.

I keep a Windows box with an installation of an old version of Finale to 
use when I am working on an especially complex piece.  Then I export as 
ETF, copy to my Linux box and run etf2ly.  That saves me some time, but 
I still spend 50% of the total time reworking the Lilypond file.

--Daniel