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Re: Do we really offer the future?


From: Gilles
Subject: Re: Do we really offer the future?
Date: Fri, 17 Apr 2015 16:45:20 +0200
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Hi.

On Fri, 17 Apr 2015 15:03:19 +0200, Urs Liska wrote:
Just one more of the fundamental questions I took home from the
Musikmesse ...

The question can be asked somewhat less pretentious then in this
message's subject line, but I think it actually boils down to no less
than that.

To whom LilyPond should strive to "offer the future"?
IMHO, certainly not to the "[...] big house[s] with traditions,
regulations and limitations".

What's for the LilyPond team in spending resources trying to work around
those self-inflicted limitations?

You know that I have again been at the Frankfurt Musikmesse this
week, and again I had the opportunity to talk with various people from publishing houses (names only privately ...), and I was (unpleasantly)
surprised that I didn't always have fully satisfactory answers ready.

The questions came in various variants of "why should a publishing
house use LilyPond?" And despite all the reasoning and writing I have
produced over the last years I didn't always find "the" striking key
features that were convincing in the concrete situation.

LilyPond is "[...] a program that creates beautiful sheet music following
the best traditions of classical music engraving." (excerpt from
"http://www.lilypond.org/introduction.html";)

I think that this goal is way more important (to users) than trying to
convince publishers.
And convince them of what?  That they will make more profit by using
another engraving tool?
They should try and find if they can benefit from LilyPond; if so, they
should _contribute_ with features that interest them.

I think  I have always taken a perspective that was focused slightly
beside the point, namely the perspective of an individual editor or
the team of editors. This is perfectly transferable to a publishing
house starting from scratch, but not to a big house with traditions,
regulations and limitations.

Then perhaps you could "start from scratch". ;-)

Compared to last year I have the impression that many people have
become more aware of the basic questions about longevity of binary and textual data formats and data processing. The question has become much
less "why should we consider dropping Finale and Sibelius, it's
working, heh?" and more "OK, we see that we need an alternative
approach, but how do you convince me that LilyPond has to be it?"

My advice is: Do not do their work for them.  If you do, they won't
believe you until they experience it for themselves (as it had to
happen to make them aware of the problem with proprietary software,
even though you had explained it before, IIUC).

We always say that text based tools are superior because they are
much less prone to become unusable. This, and the potentials that come
from version control, make quite some impression, but again this is
only relevant to new material and doesn't take into account two
important issues:

1)
Publishers receive heterogenuous data material from various sources
(editors, composers, engravers), and these are mostly done using
Finale or Sibelius (and in some cases Score). It is completely out of
question to requre all these people to switch to LilyPond.

2)
One major question publishing houses consider today is how to carry
their (digitally) existing material to the future. By now they have
realized that simply using the latest version of the mainstream
programs is calling for disaster, that's good for us. But again, the
question is: Can we really offer "the" solution for this?

The immediate idea would be to go some route via MusicXML and offer
hassle-free workflows to convert existing editions or said received
data material) to LilyPond. But firstly I don't think we can already
guarantee this. And secondly, the question is natural to pop up: If
one already uses MusicXML as the permanent and future-oriented storage
format, where is then the need to consider LilyPond for this?
I think it is reasonable to expect that there will always be
mainstream programs that can work with MusicXML files, and their user
base will probably always be larger than ours.

Is the purpose the same?  Lilypond input is oriented towards contents
creation by humans. XML is for contents manipulation by computers.

###
So, now I've somewhat laid out why we are actually facing this
question about "offering the future".
I can't give convincing answers to that, but of course I have a few
ideas, and I would be happy about a constructive discussion. This is
not a pipe dream discussion as I will (have to) pick up the
communication with the publishers soon. And it will probably make a
good impression if I can show that we have taken their concerns
seriously, especially if I can come with some promising suggestions.

A FLOSS like LilyPond is a great opportunity to share (musical)
culture, at the lowest possible cost.
A project like Mutopia is a promising future: digital scores (of public
domain music) that are free of publishers' rights.
If and when "big" publishers use LilyPond, the result will be more
restricted access (through cost) to culture (because they won't release
their proprietary contents).

I've thought for a long time that the right way to go is to seek
public funds for engraving public domain contents with the purpose
of publishing it under a GPL-like (or Creative Commons) license.

In this context, data safety (mainly: independence from a proprietary
vendor) is also an asset.

And it would create jobs...

The first asset is the fact that plain text tools allow highly
sophisticated workflows and adaptation of the programs' functionality.
The biggest impression I could make was probably our "grid" approach
(of course only backed up by the fact that we have successfully
realized it in a real project), and - to some extent - the prospect of
maintaining the whole edition process within one single context (the
\annotation functionality in the ScholarLY library). But the latter
was somewhat less striking because it seems most publishing houses
don't really care anymore about the editorial process, and they have
the impression that this could actually create more overhead than they
have currently.

The second asset I see is that we can (principally, in the real-world
it isn't completely mature yet) completely separate content from
representation, which should be stressed very much when it comes to
the questions of long-term data storage and of repurposing content.

In theory, LilyPond (as LaTeX) is better suited to process textual
data than binary tools, simply because it's their natural appraoch.
But I don't know what I would answer to the question "well, yes, I
see, but what *impact* does this really have?"

If you'd have had an answer to that one, there would have been another
question, up until the killer one: "What _financial_ impact does this
really have?"

There is one road that I could see as the "golden bridge".
I think MusicXML isn't the best solution for long-term management of
editions. It's just too much focused on data exchanged between music
software - and mostly pop music oriented tools. Looking for a
fundamental solution to migrate the whole data base of a publishing
house I would think that MEI is a much better solution because it's
inherently more comprehensive, and because it has been originally
conceived from an editor's perspective rather than music production
tools.
Currently there doesn't exist *any* straightforward way to render MEI
encoded data with a professional engraving program, so this could be
the key feature for avoiding the question "so why should we prefer
LilyPond over Sibelius or the new Steinberg app?".
IF we could come up with a promising path to let LilyPond work with
MEI data (that is firstly: use MEI as input to LilyPond and/or convert
MEI data to LilyPond files, and secondly: Be able to convert to both
directions so one can also edit scores as LilyPond and convert them
back to MEI for storage) that _could_ be the satisfactory answer I
claimed as missing above. Publishers have more than once thought about
a concerted effort with regard to data management. Of course that
would also imply a platform for _distributing_ music, so the
option/request to provide *digital* scores is also ubiquituous.
Actually this was again suggested this week in one of my meetings, and I would love to pick that up with a more or less concrete but at least
convincing outline.
At the same time the prospect of publishers (or "the" publishers in a
common effort) would consider MEI this would motivate the MEI
community, and if it would be somehow connected with LilyPond it would
raise the chance that some of them would actually step out and start
something worthwile (I know there is a latent interst in LilyPond
within the MEI community, but there's no sufficient "market" for it so
nobody actually came up with a solution so far.

It's not clear to me how the LilyPond project would benefit. What would
constitute a "sufficient market"?

####
####
To conclude:

- most people in the business have moved away from taken the status quo
  with Finale and Sibelius for granted.
- they know that they *have* to find new answers.
- many (except a few die-hard reactionists) see that LilyPond and
friends *can* offer answers to their questions
- but they also see that these are maybe not the only possible answers and - that we (currently) can't guarantee straightforward migration paths.

Market is hard, and everything is moving quite slowly, of course.
But IF we should be able to come up with convincing solutions or at
least roadmaps I see that we now have better chances than ever to get
LilyPond a foot in the door with the publishing business in general.

LilyPond's capacities are great if we look at
  http://www.lilypond.org/examples.html

If the competition does it better, nothing will change; if it does it
worse, then probably, nothing will change!!!  That is, until people
stop buying the big houses' edition because they have come across a
more beautiful rendering by LilyPond. :-)

Sorry for that elaborate text, but I think it is important and
hopefully fruitful.

Yes it is important, definitely.  Hopefully the discussion will avoid
embarking on the wrong trail.  Thanks for starting it.


Best regards,
Gilles




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