Re: Comparing LilyPond with Sibelius, Finale, Musescore etc

[Richard Shann]

On Sun, 2013-07-21 at 23:20 +0200, Mats Bengtsson wrote:
> 
> > I have been compiling some examples of LilyPond's typesetting compared
> > with those of well-known alternatives:
> >
> > http://denemo.org/CompareScorewriters
> >
> > If anyone can provide better examples - these are just taken from
> > published work that I could find with a quick search - then please let
> > me know - especially if I am not doing LilyPond justice.
> > My examples have a common origin in MusicXML files, but there may be
> > some other way of standardizing the comparisons (short of re-typing
> > music examples...).
> >
> > Richard
> It's nice to have these comparisons, but I have a couple of comments:
> - You should specify what the version number of the respective programs. 
I have added the version numbers that I have information about
> Several of the similar comparisons that have been discussed earlier on 
> the list, have been based on fairly old versions of Finale and Sibelius, 
> which may be unfair.

Well without considerable expense I can't really test Sibelius or
Finale, just report on what others have published in its name. They may
have hopeless skills in music typesetting. Where these comparisons are
strong is where the comparison is between two imports from MusicXML. If
anyone has access to the commercial programs and can do some MusicXML
imports then we could get an insight into the un-tweaked performance of
them.

> - I really like that you point out that you are not fully certain how 
> much tweaking was used in the original typesettings, but it would of 
> course be even better to have example where you have this knowledge. If 
> you search the mailing list archives,
this is something I know I am not good at (searching) I just tried
starting from the lilypond.org site and failed to find a link there to
this mailing list from which I hopefully could launch a search, which is
either a bug or the measure of my incompetence. (I looked under
community)
>  you should find several examples 
> of similar comparisons and at least one or two of these included a 
> fairly detailed comparison of the amount of tweaking that was needed for 
> the different programs.
Searching my local copy of this mailing list for "comparison" "sibelius"
and "finale" didn't get me there...
> - In the Sibelius comparison, it's really a pity that you didn't include 
> the correct lyrics. The alignment and layout of lyrics is clearly an 
> important issue in music typesetting, so I don't agree with the comment 
> that these are not important. In particular, it's a pity that they dummy 
> lyrics you have inserted for the Denemo/LilyPond version doesn't use 
> correct hyphens, i.e.
> Lo -- rem ip -- sum
> instead of
> Lo- rem ip- sum
> for example. The current example gives the false impression that 
> Denemo/LilyPond isn't able to handle hyphens correctly.

Thank you for the guidance here - I don't understand lyrics conventions
- I have pasted in the correct lyrics now and hope this is ok. I didn't
really understand what was intended where slurs are used but two
syllables appeared. I used a double underscore ipse__lorem to achieve
something like that effect, but perhaps this would constitute a tweak
(although whether the effect is anyway sound music notation I rather
doubt)

The downside is that this new version has thrown up a bug (slur crashes
accidental) which I am sure you all know about

\version "2.16.0"
\score {
{ e'4( bes') }
}

why this didn't appear with the dummy lyrics version I can't imagine.

Thank you for the feedback.

Richard


> 
> Regards
> 
>      /Mats
>