Re: mutopia's shortcomings

[Federico Bruni]

2015-04-21 1:07 GMT+02:00 Kieren MacMillan <address@hidden>:

> 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.

You forgot the quality of sheets: a (really) digital PDF will always look better than a scanned PDF.

And if it's too old or don't like anything you can change it and get what you want.

This is the value of Mutopia and the reason why I strongly disagree on the idea of merging it into IMSLP. In the past discussion on this topic there were a couple of ideas on better integration between the two projects.

 

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).