Re: How to connect Midi keyboard to Lilypond?

[James Harkins]

David Kastrup <dak <at> gnu.org> writes:

> It's been some time since I last tried, but the basic answer I arrived
> at for myself was "don't bother".  The tools are not good enough right
> now to save time.

I have to agree with David here.

When I first started looking at LilyPond, one of my first questions was
about MIDI input. But then I realized:

- I would have used MIDI for step input (hold a note, press a key for the
rhythmic value). So, which is faster? Reaching for another keyboard to hold
down, say, F and type 2, or just to type "f2" on one keyboard? Seemed to me
that it would be faster to stick with one keyboard (the computer keyboard).

- Being dependent on a MIDI keyboard for input would mean that I would find
it harder to enter music when I didn't have the MIDI keyboard. For instance,
last spring, I needed to hack up a very quick Amazing Grace setting for
flute and bassoon. So I jotted a few notes on paper, then went to a cafe
typed into LilyPond for, oh, 15-20 minutes or so (including slurs and other
expressive marks) and I could e-mail the score, using only my laptop, no
extra hardware.

- With a MIDI keyboard, I would be back to the Finale hell of correcting
enharmonic misspellings. Typing LilyPond code directly, I just write the
enharmonic that I want. If I need D-double-flat, I just write dff (using
English note names -- deses in Dutch). With MIDI, it would transcribe C
natural first, and then I would have to fix it. That's not exactly a
timesaver. (This touches on one of the big reasons why I like LilyPond much
better. The wysiwyg Finale approach is to make a lot of layout mistakes by
default and allow the user to correct them. The LilyPond approach is to make
fewer layout mistakes to begin with.)

In short, I was asking about MIDI note input because that's what I was used
to in Finale. It didn't take too long to figure out that it was faster and
easier to just type the code.

hjh