Re: musescore lands sponsoring?

[mike]

On 29 mai 2012, at 23:56, Lucas Gonze wrote:

> On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 2:16 PM, Nils <address@hidden> wrote:
>> AFAIK musescore dropped Lilypond export support because of a lack of 
>> interest and in favour of musicXML (whatever that means, I read it somewhere 
>> on the musescore twitter account or something like this).
>> It may still work, but we can expect it to break a little more with each 
>> Lilypond release.
> 
> Musecore and Lilypond are both open source. A GUI would benefit
> Lilypond. There's no reason for a Lilypond person to not work on .ly
> export from the Musecore front end.
> 
> I feel like this conversation is unnecessarily competitive. These
> projects have a *lot* in common. I am rooting for both.

I know I'm rehashing old ground, but I think that these projects stand to 
mutually benefit from each other if and only if they evolve in "natural" 
directions given their goals.

MuseScore reminds me of Finale and Sibelius and it seems like it should do this 
as best as possible.

LilyPond needs to be an excellent typesetter (like SCORE).  It needs to be for 
people who put layout above all else.  In general, the idea of LilyPond is to 
build a master engraver - a virtual person who, using various directives, 
creates a score following hundreds of years of engraving knowledge.  Like any 
master engraver, this involves trial and error and testing out multiple 
possibilities, which is exactly what LilyPond does - for any slur you see in a 
score, LilyPond is testing between 50 and 100 slurs to see which one fits best. 
 These tests take time and, if they were done for every change in a WYSIWYG 
score (because every change in a score has the potential to effect every 
element of a score) it would slow the score down immensely.

LilyPond 2.18 (yes, 2.18, not 2.16) will contain various changes in lyrics and 
skylines that build even more engraver knowledge into LilyPond, which will slow 
it down by about 1-5 seconds for a 60 second score.  These scores will look 
less airy in many cases.  These types of features are the ones that I think 
will improve LilyPond's typesetting most.

So, with respect to your comment above, I too am rooting for both programs.  I 
think what they have in common is that they both produce scores.  However, I'd 
encourage everyone to help both programs distinguish themselves through their 
differences.  The nightmare scenario, in my opinion, is that the two programs, 
competing over a user-base somewhere in the middle, converge.  To paraphrase 
what Bill Clinton said of Washington DC, it'd be like "A combination of 
northern hospitality and southern efficiency."

Cheers,
MS