Re: mutopia's shortcomings

[Noeck]

Hi,

> IMSLP (with 310,000 scores) and Mutopia (with 1,900)

I don’t think that it should be put this way. IMSLP looks nicer, has
much more scores and thus the chances to find what you are looking for
is much better.
But Mutopia’s focus is on editable LilyPond scores while IMSLP is mostly
scanned scores. This implies extra reasons to exist for Mutopia:
- scores can be edited by the user with a free program
- the github repository in the back allows for a consistently managing
  updates
But most of all there is no either-or: Nobody prevents you from putting
LilyPond scores on Mutopia *and* on IMSLP. Even more, you can link from
an IMSLP entry to the source on Mutopia. This combines the best of two
sites: Score updates can be handled in the Mutopia github repo and the
scores can be presented to a wider public on the nice IMSLP web page.

>> I think it’s mainly three problems:
>> – Lilypond versions, as Paul already mentioned.

Which are updated pretty successfully step by step, despite the low
manpower. https://github.com/MutopiaProject/MutopiaProject/milestones

>> – 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.

I would not be so harsh. I just picked three input files at random and I
would say, I could use all of them, because the musical content is
properly written there. I would add more tweaks but it is a good start.
I already used one and edited it for a choir (in real life ;) ).
I am not sure yet whether my "improvements" should be pushed to Mutopia:
https://github.com/MutopiaProject/MutopiaProject/issues/575

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

This is true and it reassures me that you mention exactly the points I
would change in virtually any score:
>> increase paper margins,
>> use another text font,
>> manually improve page and line breaking

(cf. https://github.com/MutopiaProject/MutopiaProject/issues/141)

> 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).

I am looking forward to that.

– Another issue is: Mostly only small pieces can be found for obvious
reasons (less effort). But this is also addressed:
https://github.com/MutopiaProject/MutopiaProject/issues/355
and this might give more visibility of LilyPond also on IMSLP.


I complained about Mutopia my self some years ago, starting a similar
thread (mainly about visual quality and the web-design). But I think it
is the same situation as for many LilyPond issues: Complaining does not
help. It needs volunteers and work to change things. The people working
on Mutopia are open for any good proposals.

Cheers,
Joram