Re: Trouble starting Lilypond

[Arvid Grøtting]

Mats Bengtsson <address@hidden> writes:

> Unfortunately, there have been several reports on the mailing list
> that this [etf2ly] conversion program has several bugs and
> limitations.

You can say that again.

I've used it a couple of times to prepare scores for the choir I sing
in, and as delivered it:

- only handles major keys; minor keys don't work (I've posted a patch
  for this, but I'm not sure it always works)

- loses silent measures (i.e. full-measure rests); this is easily
  overcome by inserting the rests manually, _unless_ you have key
  changes; when you do, some of the assumptions in the script don't
  hold and the accidentals get really wild.  (I've been looking into
  the script to find a patch for this, too, but so far to no avail.)

- mangles lyrics quite badly.

All of the above shortcomings stem from serious brain-damage in the
ETF file format, so it's the usual garbage in - garbage out
situation.

I've had the script fail mysteriously as well.  There are other
shortcomings as well.  Oh, and in the final \score block, a <> pair
has to be changed to a <<>> pair for the .ly file to work -- this,
too, is addressed by my patch (which is in the archives), if I'm not
mistaken.

I have an impression that noone has put very much hard work into the
etf2ly script, probably because a) noone uses it very much and b)
converting from brain-damaged file formats is not a funny task.
Still, in many cases it gives far superior results compared to
midi2ly.

As in all cases where you convert music to Lilypond format, though,
you must expect to tweak the output.

-- 

Arvid