Re: Supporting my work on LilyPond financially

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi David,

> I'm always a bit surprised about the low resonance on features like
> 
> <URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=3648>
> Issue 3648: Patch: Isolated durations in music sequences now stand for
> unpitched notes

It’s a nice feature… but applicable, I would imagine, to a spectacularly small 
percentage of users. I, for one, can think of exactly three staves (and then 
only a fraction of the measures in those staves) in I would have used this 
feature, out of the last several thousand that I’ve engraved.

On the other hand, something really useful — and helpful in getting users “out 
of the code” — would be the ability to say:

lastCymbalCrash = {
  \atMoment (256 . 1) b4\accent\sff
}

and then output a 256-measure part (complete with rests, time signatures, etc.) 
for the poor cymbal player with

\score {
  \new RhythmicStaff << \theGlobalStuff \lastCymbalCrash >>
}

Or how about

\score {
  \new Staff \with { \lineBreaksAt (5 10 17 21 26) \pageBreaksAt (17) 
\autoBreaksOnAt (26) }  \theMusic
}

Or any of a dozen other functions I could dream up in a few minutes which would 
make life easier here in the trenches.

> most of the time I'm left alone with figuring out what might work best for 
> people.

This, I think, is the key problem with "front-end” Lilypond development right 
now: there are spectacular things going on in the "back-end" — prerequisites, 
of course, for real advance(s) to the “front-end” — but there are few real 
quantum leaps on the user side that mean anything to people who are cranking 
out real-world scores on a daily basis. And those are the ones that reduce the 
well-documented inertia that keep many users from switching to Lilypond.

When 2.18 is out, perhaps the ‘Pond would benefit from a discussion of what 
real-world functions might bring us closer to some of those “huddled masses 
yearning to be free”.

Cheers,
Kieren.