Re: multiple timesignatures

[Janek Warchoł]

2011/7/22 Ruud van Silfhout <address@hidden>:
> I saw that in January of this year a new feature called compoundTime 
> signatures
> is introduced in Lilypond. A good effort. compoundTime specified the timing of
> each measure. However, for church music (esp. hymns) this does not suffice. 
> What
> you see there is that multiple meters are specified a the start of the music.
> This means that the of a song each measure is in one of the initial meters. 
> This
> can be seen in the image below (This is BTW a part from Bernstein’s America,
> West Side Story, so this does not happen in church music only ;-)).
>
> So two measures, each with  a different meter. In church music you also see 
> that
> the number of measures that are written in one meter differs from the number 
> of
> times a second meter occurs. So typically at the end of a chorus line or near
> the end of a song the second meter is used.

In the "regular" case (for example \multiMeter 2/2 3/4  c2 e2 | g4 g4
g4 | a2 d2 | e4 f4 c4 | c2 g2 ... - i.e. one bar of first meter, one
bar of second, one bar of fisrt, and so on) it's surely doable.  I
think i saw a discussion about it on mailing list (containing a nice
function that defined nicely not only the time signature stencil, but
also internal meter workings (like beat division), and it didn't
require specifying a time signature with \time command).  Please
search the archives.
In "irregular" case (i.e. a lot of measures in first meter and a
different meter at the end), i'm not sure.

> The first fraction in the \multiMeter list is the initial \time to start.
> Subsequently the user specifies \time 3/4  which selects another meter from 
> the
> initial meters. The effect is that, because the \time specified as one of the
> initial meters, it is not printed. When e.g. a \time is specified that is not 
> in
> the set on initial meters (e.g. 5/8 in this example) , the time signature is
> printed, When the \time changes back to an item from the multi meter list, 
> that
> time signature is printed (or perhaps all time signatures from the \multiMeter
> list: that is not clear to me, but that could be an additional option). 
> Normally
> the \multiMeter list is empty, which ensures that all time signatures are
> printed as it was before.
>
> I’m willing to help with the implementation,

Great!

> but I’m not experienced in the lily code

that's not a big problem.

> and I have currently no environment where I can compile and build a version
> of lilypond.

Have you looked at Lilydev? It's our suggested "environment" for
contributing to Lily.
It's described in chapter 2 of Contributor's Guide
(http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.15/Documentation/contributor/quick-start).
You may also try to simply download an archive with the source
(http://lilypond.org/website/source.html) and browse it, but
installing Lilydev will give you much more possibilities.

2011/7/23 Ruud van Silfhout <address@hidden>:
> However, I thought now compoundMeters made it into lily, it is also time that
> multiple meters should make it into lily as a logical successor :-).
> So, I still hope to  integrate a nice solution into lilypond. Or am I barking 
> up
> the wrong tree by posting it to the user news group instead of the developer
> news group.

We are watching you wherever you are ;)
Concerning integrating this function with Lily, i suppose it should be
added to music-functions-init.ly (that's where compoundMeter ended as
i see).
Please try installing Lilydev (or other development environment),
check if you can make this 'multiMeter' function more elegant using
any info that may be available in archives, add it to the source tree
and contact us.
I'll gladly help you with any problems that may arise during that
process - don't hesitate to ask!  Remember that there are no stupid
questions here; i know this well because not long ago i was a complete
noob and had to learn everything, including usage of command-line :)

thanks,
Janek