Mutopia [WAS: Re: Add LilyPond incipit on an IMSLP page.]

[Federico Bruni]

2014-05-08 16:49 GMT+02:00 Pierre Perol-Schneider <address@hidden>:

Can I  ask you why? It's because of the license restrictions (NonCommercial clause is not accepted by Mutopia)?

Because I'm no Mutopia user.

Now the right question would be why am I not a user ?

Well, few years ago I've downloaded one or two files and, as far as I remember :
a) None of'em were compilable.

b) Copy/paste-ing the notes took me much more time than rewriting the whole score after a facsimile.

c) Pdfs look bad (what's the purpose of such footers ??).

Yes, the footer looked bad, but it changed recently thanks to the contribution of Noeck (who started contributing to Mutopia after the discussion we had in January on this list).

We are also in the process of updating all the files to at least version 2.16 (possibly, 2.18).

Glen used to lead this effort, I'll ping him to go on to the next step.

 

I've just take a quick look at the Mutopia site. I'd like to add :

a) it is written "The Mutopia Project offers sheet music editions of classical music for free download" ; which means that it is in direct competition with IMSLP. Does it make sense ?

Yes, it does. IMSLP doesn't offer the (lilypond) source used to produce the PDF, so their users cannot modify the scores or re-adapt them in derivative works.

 

b) the composer's pages are not user-friendly ; why not using a wiki system ?

Yes, it would be nice if Mutopia had a better interface. OTOH I think that Github may be considered user-friendly, if people knew how to use it :-) (I'd like to write a post on this for lilypondblog.org sooner or later).

c) a majority of (all ?) scores are coded "relatively" ; exept when coding for organ, piano, harp, etc. I never use \relative

I see, but most users use \relative and all the snippets in the LilyPond documentation are written in relative mode. So it's no surprise that most of Mutopia pieces are written in relative mode.

In Frescobaldi you can easily change the notes from relative to absolute and the other way around.

 

d) there is no coding convention; many Mutopia codes (e.g. http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ftp/BrownCJ/lullaby/lullaby.ly)  give me headhaches.

If there were too much coding conventions, may a piece written in absolute mode would not be accepted :-)

Jokes aside.. I agree with you, Mutopia needs better coding conventions and a general reformatting.

 

e) there are numbers of pretty old version (v2.4 for this one : http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ftp/CarcassiM/O60/carcassi-op60-01/carcassi-op60-01.ly)

Few persons are working on it.

I hope to announce in 2014 "All Mutopia pieces are updated to 2.16 or 2.18".

 

f)...etc. (too long)

I'd like to conclude that Mutopia site remains the same for years, no improvement, no discussion (except you, Federico). So, if nothing changes, I don't see any future for this site.

Yes, the site is the same but there's been some discussion and activity on the last months:

https://github.com/chrissawer/The-Mutopia-Project/pulls?direction=desc&page=1&sort=updated&state=closed

I hope that you'll change your mind one day :-)

Thanks for your comments