Re: Sibelius user looking for the easiest way to learn LilyPond

[David Bobroff]

On 3/12/2012 1:52 PM, John Link wrote:

On Mar 12, 2012, at 9:42 AM, David Bobroff wrote:

On 3/11/2012 6:39 PM, John Link wrote:

A few years ago I was encouraged to try LilyPond as an alternative to Sibelius because LilyPond produced more beautiful scores. I was also told that it would allow me to do things like specify that bars 25 through 32 are to be identical to bars 9 through 16 and avoid cutting and pasting from bars 9-16 into 25-32. I liked what I heard, but I was quite shocked by LilyPond's interface. I would be interested in hearing from any Sibelius users who have successfully learned LilyPond. How can I get going in LilyPond as quickly as possible?

In case it's relevant, I should add that I used to program in FORTRAN and a little bit of UNIX but never in any other languages.

Thanks in advance,

John Link

Hi John,

I can't really speak to LilyPond vs Sibelius use.  On the other hand, I used to be a Finale user and I have had *very* limited contact with Sibelius.  Having said that, while I'm aware of differences between Sibelius and Finale they share a major feature; namely, an interactive graphical user interface which displays your music while you work.  LilyPond, as you have likely discerned, does not work that way at all.  I have found that, for me at least, the learning curve for LilyPond is not terribly steep, but it's long-ish.  I know just about nothing about FORTRAN aside from the fact that it's an old programming language, but I would imagine that having programming experience would be helpful.

I think the main hurdle is getting used to focusing on the informational content as you input your scores and worry about output later if you need to tweak it.  The idea is that LilyPond should do the actual 'engraving' for you without much intervention on your part.

Hope this was useful,

-David

Thank you, David. What you wrote is very helpful. Here are a few more questions:

1) What is the easiest way to extract parts from a score?

A Zen master would reply "mu" (= un-ask the question).  "Extracting" parts is a meaningless idea in LilyPond.  What you actually do is build scores.  A score may consist of a full orchestral score, or a two-measure example of a melody.  Have you gone through the tutorial yet?

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.14/Documentation/learning/tutorial

That's really the place to start.  Oh, another thing; Getting your work flow set up makes a lot of difference.  While there are graphical front-ends available for LilyPond I prefer straight text editing.  My preference is Emacs (on Windows or Linux).  There is a file for setting up Emacs to recognize LilyPond input files which makes editing a lot easier.  Things get color-coded and indents are set up, etc.

2) Are there any features in Finale (or Sibelius or any other scorewriter with a GUI) that you wish you had in LilyPond?

I can't think of one.  Then again, I haven't used anything but LilyPond for at least ten years.

-David