Re: Comparing LilyPond with Sibelius, Finale, Musescore etc

[Richard Shann]

On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 13:01 -0400, Carl Peterson wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 12:44 PM, Richard Shann
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>         On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 17:23 +0200, pls wrote:
>         
>         >  (both MusicXML and their corresponding PDF/PNG files) as
>         reference files:
>         http://www.musicxml.com/music-in-musicxml/example-set/.  They
>         cover quite a broad spectrum of music notation.  I would
>         simply open these files with different applications and save
>         the rendered scores each time as PDF files without changing /
>         tweaking anything.  Then we can compare the resulting PDF
>         files.
>         >
>         > Of course this doesn't necessarily tell anything about the
>         quality of music engraving of the compared applications.  It
>         rather shows the quality of the file format conversion of
>         these programs.
>         
>         Yes, for this reason I suggest we do *not* do this, as it will
>         distract
>         attention from the main point that people do not understand,
>         namely that
>         just by inputting the music they want to play into LilyPond
>         they can get
>         a nicely playable score; whereas if they input the music into
>         a
>         drawing-based program they will have to position things by
>         eye, using
>         the mouse.
>         (There is a secondary point, that if they alter the music in a
>         LilyPond
>         score the re-positioning of everything else takes place
>         automatically,
>         which often it will not with a drawing program).
>         
>         We will not help people by replacing this insight with
>         observations
>         about how bad musicxml2ly or, worse still Denemo's musicxml
>         import is.
>         Well, in fact they are not so bad, inasmuch as it would be
>         self-defeating to import all manner of typesetting information
>         into
>         Denemo or LilyPond, these importers are there to save typing
>         in reams of
>         notes and durations basically. But, we will not communicate
>         the main
>         message this way.
>         
>         So what we need is some musicXML files which just contain some
>         basic
>         information, e.g.
>         
>         notes durations and markings
>         
>         the sort of thing someone might expect to type/click in to a
>         program to
>         tell it about the music they want.
>         
>         This would take some donkey work, though (potentially
>         stripping out
>         information about beaming, slur positioning ...), and it *may*
>         not be
>         needed. A first stab might be simply exporting scores from the
>         commercial programs in musicXML and then reading them back. I
>         did this
>         with MuseScore http://denemo.org/compare#Example_2 and the
>         gives a good
>         insight into how much hand-tweaking is needed in MuseScore.
>         This would
>         not illustrate the point if Musescore exported more
>         information to
>         musicXML and imported more back and it may not work for other
>         programs
>         which may do this, but it *may* work just fine.
>         
> 
> 
> This may be what you're getting at with the musicXML idea, but what
> about doing what we usually do to demonstrate lilypond...take a
> reference score, and set it up with no manual edits? So, for example,
> in Finale you would be able to connect slurs from notehead to
> notehead, but not adjust the curve in any way. In LP, you would add
> the parentheses and nothing else. This eliminates any issue of
> musicXML translation and trying to get the musicXML figured out may
> end up being like the post a few weeks ago where the poster decided it
> was easier to re-input the score than to deal with converting
> software.

We have  just crossed in the post on this issue. We would need willing
owners of proprietary programs to do signifcant work ...

Richard