Re: Steinberg's progress report on new notation software

[luis jure]

on 2013-08-08 at 14:16 Urs Liska wrote:

> What could be useful however (I don't know _anything_ about it) would be 
> to add a chapter to the documentation talking about how to get 
> high-quality audio output from/through LilyPond, referencing useful free 
> soundfonts or whatever is useful to get this to work.

the quality of the soundfonts will naturally make a difference. but i
think it's more important to have a good midi to begin with. last time i
tried it, the midi output generated by lilypond was very basic, just
pitches and durations. IIRC, velocity is fixed at 127, and dynamic is
mapped to changes in volume. so basically you get everything played ffff
with someone turning up and down the volume knob of the radio... in my
opinion, even with the best soundfonts in most situations you'll only get a
very crude rendering.

i haven't been following too closely the development of notation/composing
applications for windows and mac, but i've seen enough to know that their
rendering engines are *far* more complex than sending basic midi messages
to a couple of good soundfonts. packages like the garritan orchestra or the
eastwest collections are huge beasts where not only the quality (and sheer
quantity) of the sound samples is important, but also the ability to
properly interpret dynamics (including things like crescendo or
decrescendo during a note), legato, staccato and all kinds of
articulations, tremolos, trills, different playing techniques, etc, etc. 

just listen to some of the demos here, and if you can stand the horrible
music, you'll see (hear, that is) what i mean:

http://www.soundsonline.com/Symphonic-Orchestra

browsing through the manual can also be revealing: 

http://www.soundsonline-forums.com/docs/EW-QL_Orchestra_Manual.pdf

in short, you need both:

- a complex midi sequence, with all kinds of CC messages to represent all
  the information involved in musical notation besides the notes,

- a *very* complex rendering system, to properly interpret all those
  messages.

that's what people who buy those things pay hundreds of $$$ for.

i guess that lilypond midi output could be somewhat improved, and with some
further tweaking in a dedicated midi sequencer and a good soundfont you
can get reasonable results for simple music. but if you want to talk about
"high-quality audio output", that's something different. and i don't think
lilypond will ever compete there, because LP is a *notation* software, and
Finale is not.