Re: High-level users?

[address@hidden]

On Sep 23, 2011, at 9:38 PM, Seth Williamson wrote:

This has all been very interesting.  But almost nobody addressed my main question.  Namely, are there any, or many, pros out there who have chosen LilyPond over Sibelius or Finale?  I did appreciate hearing from Kieran MacMillan.

I have been in the music biz for 10ish years and I have only seen this choice being made recently with a handful of editors on the French lilypond mailing list.  If you consider the clergy music professionals (I do insofar as the music they're typesetting is linked to their vocation), you can add a few more from this list.

For the majority of my professional musicking years, I didn't even know LilyPond existed.  So, I would guess that the majority of people have not made this choice because they do not know if LilyPond exists, and if they did know, they wouldn't make the switch because of the cost in time of learning a new program and changing all of one's documents over to a new format.

Somebody said there have been 2 million downloads of MuseScore.  Does anybody know if MuseScore is gaining many former LilyPond adherents?  I know for a fact that my girlfriend definitely prefers it.

I would not be surprised if MuseScore's usage has already eclipsed that of LilyPond and if some LilyPond users move over to MuseScore.  I am almost positive that Finale and Sibelius combined dwarf the usage of SCORE.  They do different things.  I see LilyPond evolving towards something like SCORE with easier input syntax and more features, and I think MuseScore will eventually be able to perform at the same level as Finale and Sibelius.

The scenario you described before of a group of arrangers around computers making changes on the fly under time pressure could never work with LilyPond in its current state - it needs to recompile a score every time to get the horizontal spacing right.  Furthermore, the people working in these groups likely feel much more comfortable with a WYSIWYG interface - it is certainly better for error checking, which likely counts much more than correct spacing and collisions of fermatas with slurs in time crunches.

Cheers,

MS