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

[Antonio Gervasoni]

John Link <johnlink <at> nyc.rr.com> writes:

> 
> 
>  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
> 
> P.S. I sent the message above but I didn't receive it so 
I'm sending it again. I have seen messages from 
other users. http://www.cdbaby.com/all/johnlink
> http://www.myspace.com/johnlinkproject 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> lilypond-user mailing list
> lilypond-user <at> gnu.org
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
> 

Hi John,

I have been a Sibelius user since the very first version of the software and 
I still use Sibelius a lot. However, I majored in Systems Engineering before 
studying music composition and one of the things I liked from that career 
was programming. This is one of the reasons I like Lilypond so much!

Having said that, Sibelius is still faster than Lilypond! I've read a lot of 
posts where people say that inputing notes is faster in Lilypond but that may
be true only if you input a very simple piece of music. It is one thing to
typeset a string quartet by Haydn but quite another with an orchestral piece
by Stravinsky!

Of course, just typing notes in a keyboard may be faster than inputing them
with the mouse but the workflow becomes very slow when you have to 
make all the necessary tweaks to get a nice result. Also, there are lots of
different expressions and commands and some of them are very complex. 

Take for example a tuplet. It requires this expression: \times 2/3 { c8 d e }.
It's easy if there are just a few tuplets in the piece, but it gets much more
difficult if these occur quite often, even worse if a whole passage,
say 10 bars, is comprised only of tuplets! 

Yes, you can copy and paste the expression but you still have to type the
right notes for each tuplet.

I'm right now in the process of transcribing an old piece I wrote when I
was studying at the Conservatory. It's just 6 minutes long but requires an
entire orchestra and it has a very "Stravinskian" style, with constant time
signature changes and a lot of chromatism. 

Thus, it has taken me a lot of time and effort and I'm not even finished
after several months! I'm quite sure I would have been able to accomplish
the same in Sibelius in just a few weeks (maybe even less)
but in Lilypond it seems like forever! 

(I must say here that I've been using Lilypond for just one year so the slow
workflow might as well be because I'm still learning and figuring out the
proper ways to do many things)

Yet, despite all that, I still like Lilypond, for several reasons:

1. The final score definitely looks better than the output of any other 
scorewriting software.

2. It's open source!

3. What I said at the beginning: it's like programming, which is something 
I miss from my first career!

4. It is developed by users for users! It has no commercial interest so it's
totallyindependent from a company like Avid making some bad decision
like firing all the developers in London, which they did just recently! 

(We still don't know what will happen with Sibelius in the future......
it might well be terminated, thoug this seems a quite impossible scenario).
So one needs a Plan B, just in case!........ I WILL NEVER END
USING FINALE (for reasons I will not explain here)

Would I recommend Lilypond: of course! But not if you have to do
quick jobs! That's why I keep using Sibelius!

Regards,

Antonio