Re: on marketing

[Carl Peterson]

On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 1:19 PM, Richard Shann <address@hidden> wrote:

On Sat, 2013-12-07 at 18:11 +0100, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 07/12/13 18:07, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> > Beethoven's 104 Piano Sonatas
>
> That would be 32 :-)  But 104 separate movements in total ...

Is that because MuseScore cannot handle scores with several movements, I
wonder. Contrast that with a LilyPond score with multiple movements,
appendices, table of contents ... I generated a few scores with all that
via Denemo a while back. But still people carry on using MuseScore.

Richard

Richard,

I use MuseScore for quick and dirty composition work...I'm not trying to make it "pretty," I'm just trying to get it on a page and be able to directly manipulate it. I've done that with Finale when I've had some version of it installed on my computer. I can do that with MuseScore. I tried a couple of times to do it with Denemo and really didn't have a good experience. Part of it is the very menu-centric approach (too cluttered), but in general, it just wasn't intuitive to me as a GUI. MuseScore does well enough for what I do with it. I think that initial experience with Denemo can be very overwhelming, particularly if we're talking about someone coming from a Finale-like experience. I've used Finale and a broad selection of other music tools (both composition and production), and Denemo was just...different. MuseScore is different from Finale, but it's alike enough to be a much shallower learning curve.

To bring us back to Marketing, it's well and good to talk about all the things that LilyPond or Denemo or Frescobaldi can do that Finale and/or Sibelius can't. However, if we're looking at convincing people to switch from Finale and/or Sibelius to the LilyPond sphere of influence, we have to be able to show them that everything Finale can do, LilyPond can do, and can do as well, if not better. Urs put together a good example of this when he demonstrated the ease of constructing the rhythm patterns from the theory book. But admittedly, that's a high-level/obscure case that a lot of people, frankly, won't see as being applicable to their use case.

Carl