Re: mutopia's shortcomings

[Kieren MacMillan]

Hi all,

> Seems to me it has been quite successful in its goals of making sheet music 
> easily available for free, all works in the public domain or under creative 
> commons licenses, in (user-editable, user-improvable) LilyPond format, pdf, 
> and midi — all with volunteer labor.  Looks like the total is over 1900 works 
> now.

Other than the “user-editable, user-improvable” issue, all of those things are 
far better done by IMSLP. Put another way, looking at IMSLP (with 310,000 
scores) and Mutopia (with 1,900), the shine quickly comes off Mutopia for 
anyone except the handful of hardcore DIY musicians who (e.g.,) want to take a 
violin piece from Mutopia and make a guitar arrangement.

I think it would be far better — and probably result in better 
visibility/marketing for Lilypond — if Mutopia were merged into IMSLP. (There 
appears to have been a thought in this direction at some point, but not any 
more; cf. 
http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:Community_Projects/Mutopia_score_archive). Then, 
for important works, there would be the Lilypond source, side-by-side with 
scans of existing editions. But it seems this was considered, and rejected for 
exactly the reasons that Mutopia now flounders (cf. 
http://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP_talk:Community_Projects/Mutopia_score_archive).

> On Apr 20, 2015, at 5:58 PM, Simon Albrecht <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> I think it’s mainly three problems:
> – Lilypond versions, as Paul already mentioned.

Yes.

> – Coding style: the lilypond code I saw till now from Mutopia mostly gave me 
> a real headache, because it was excessively hard to read, inefficient or 
> hacky. Which makes reusing it an unpleasant experience.

Yes. I would call real code reuse — certainly anything other than the most 
trivial cut-and-paste exercise — essentially impossible.

> – Visual quality of the output: Many of the scores very effectively display 
> that using Lilypond does not warrant making beautiful scores

Yes. Urs and I are hoping to change this (dramatically, for the better, in one 
fell swoop) with the openLilyLib stylesheet project. But for now, the defaults 
in Lilypond are far from publication quality (IMO).

Cheers,
Kieren.
________________________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: address@hidden