Re: Is lilypond suitable for big composition projects?

[David Kastrup]

Jonas Daverio <address@hidden> writes:

> That may seem like a stupid question, but I've been using LilyPond with
> Frescobaldi for a year and a half, but I start to ask myself if it is as
> efficient as if I had used another tool like Musescore.
>
> I explain: I don't have at all a powerful computer, and I think that an
> essential feature that I have to have to compose efficiently is to see what
> I've written in real-time. There is such a feature in Frescobaldi name
> "continuous engraving" (or something like that, my version is not in
> English), but on my slow computer and with a big project such as a 20-pages
> quartet or symphony, it takes at least 40 to 50 seconds to render.
>
> In addition, it would be great to hear the music out of the midi file by
> clicking on the preview (like on almost every WYSIWYG music software) but
> Frescobaldi's midi player is pretty useless for that.
>
> I'm not saying that LilyPond and Frescobaldi are bad, it's probably just me
> who don't know the right tools or the right way to use them. I'm asking to
> find a way to make my workflow more convenient to compose.
>
> Do you have any suggestions?

LilyPond is for typesetting rather than composing, and with current
tools I suspect you are better off using paper for composing, then
entering stuff in the first completed sketch.  I had a remotely
comparable problem at one time: "is LaTeX suitable for working on
mathematics?", namely for creating work in progress.

My answer to that was preview-latex
<https://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/preview-latex.html> which uses a
combination of various technics to deliver a WYSIWYG editing environment
for fragments of typical math size.  That approach would also work
nicely for music theoretical texts or the LilyPond documentation, where
passages of text are interspersed with limited musical fragments.

For continuous compositions, I have a hard time imagining something
equally useful and intuitive.

-- 
David Kastrup