Re: How do you insert measures into scores with many parts?

[Saul Tobin]

It's almost certainly feasible to write a script to run within an editor that would use Lilypond itself to parse the duration of the music _expression_ and insert, lengthen, or shorten material at a specified point within it — given some rigid but typical assumptions about the structure of the input file, such as each variable in a file representing music that begins together and ends together, and musical material with duration being literally written in the _expression_ at hand, not included by variable reference. The code in Scheme would be very similar to the snippet shared earlier in the thread to adjust rest duration based on tagged moments — thanks for sharing that by the way, very interesting! Doing it that way would avoid the need to label measure numbers with comments (though that has inherent usefulness just to reading the code).

It would be, I suspect, a bit awkward to do this as a Frescobaldi snippet, since I don't see a way to do it natively in Python without porting a large amount of Lilypond's Scheme API.

I'll add this to my list of Lilypond coding ideas. I may give it a try when I have some spare time and energy. It would indeed be a major time saver to have an easy way to insert or remove a measure.

Saul

On Sat, Sep 28, 2024, 2:01 PM David Zelinsky <dsz@dedekind.net> wrote:

Sebastian Menge <s.menge@gmx.de> writes:

> I am not an expert in lilypond, but as a language it does not have the
> proper semantics/structures to do that - it is not XML or Json or so. Other
> Notation programs have internal data structures that make it easy to
> implement that.
>
> So the editor has to overcome it. And the editor then needs hints, e.g.
> line numbers or bar checks.
>
> I think there simply is no solution possible for this.
>
> Regards, Sebastian.

If by "no solution possible" you mean one that would automatically
insert the desired bars given any valid lilypond input, I agree that
would be difficult.  But it's easy enough for a user to impose a more
rigid structure on their own input files---which is what I and I think
many people do---and then it's easy enough to parse, at least at the
rather course level we're talking about here.

-David


> David Zelinsky <dsz@dedekind.net> schrieb am Sa., 28. Sept. 2024, 18:24:
>
>> David Bellows <davebellows@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> > This is a question that came up on Reddit the other day and I didn't
>> > have an answer (it never happens to me).
>> >
>> > Say you are working on a score with multiple parts (like an orchestra)
>> > and you need to insert some measures into all the parts somewhere in
>> > the middle of the piece. Is there a way to organize things to minimize
>> > the hassle? Having to go to each file for each part and insert the
>> > measures would be a huge pain especially when compared to how
>> > relatively easy this is for other notation programs (so I'm told). And
>> > if you have to do this more than once then it's especially cumbersome.
>> >
>> > I know with some editors you can search and replace multiple files at
>> > once but this feels like it would mess up any internal organization
>> > with respect to bar numbers in the LilyPond file (in the comments).
>> >
>> > I understand that many people only use LilyPond for engraving so this
>> > isn't a problem for them, but there are those of us who compose
>> > directly in LilyPond and this could be a potential issue.
>> >
>> > I guess I'm wondering if there is a way of writing your LilyPond files
>> > in such a way to make this easier than just manually going through
>> > each part and changing them.
>>
>> As others have said, this is much easier if you write your parts with
>> one bar per line, and also label them in some stereotypical way.  (I use
>> emacs, and I've modified lilypond mode to add a newline with a bar check
>> and a commented bar number label when I type Control-Return.)  Then it
>> would be easy enough to make one file with the list of bars to be
>> inserted for each instrument labeled with the filename for that
>> instrument, and write a script to automatically insert them all.
>>
>> If I had to do this once, rather than fuss with writing and debugging a
>> script I would probably do it manually in emacs, recording a keyboard
>> macro while I do the first instrument, and then doing each of the rest
>> by calling that macro with a single key stroke.
>>
>> As for messing up the bar numbering, this is a standard problem in
>> musical theater, where bars are often added or removed during rehearsals
>> or previews, and the standard solution is to label bars inserted after,
>> say, bar 17 as 17a, 17b, etc.  If you want the bars numbered accordingly
>> in the output, I guess you could define a barNumberFormatter for this
>> purpose. (I've never done that, so I'm not sure if that's the right
>> solution.  Maybe someone can suggest the right way. There is
>> Score.alternativeNumberingStyle that can be set to
>> #'numbers-with-letters, but that only applies to volta alternatives.)
>> Then set Score.currentBarNumber to what it had been after the inserted
>> passage.
>>
>> Alternatively, it would be easy to write a script that modifies all the
>> commented bar numbers in a file (or section thereof) to make them
>> consecutive.  (My modified emacs lilypond mode has a function that does
>> this.)
>>
>> Really, rather than being a drawback (as someone suggested), I feel it
>> is a great advantage that Lilypond's plain text format allows one to use
>> very general text processing tools.
>>
>>
>> --
>> David Zelinsky
>>
>>