Re: [Denemo-devel] Fw =?ISO-8859-1?Q?d: Denemo & REAPER?=

[list]

First: I do not speak for the Denemo Team but only for myself. This does
not mean that the following is only my opinion but its also an objective
description of law and the ways licenses work.
This mail is adressed to the reaper guys, eventhough they might not read
it here in our mailing list.

I have to fully read the REAPER forum to understand what they want but a
few things can be said already:

1. Even with the code of Denemo this is a hard or a nearly impossible
project. Denemo has many dependencies, the biggest one is Lilypond
itself. Of course this can be stripped (all the audio and midi APIs we
added recently) but some things will remain, Lilypond and Scheme. Both
are likely too much for Reaper. Without Ly its not possible to
satisfyingly use Denemo for notation and without Scheme its not possible
at all. Then Denemos very basic GTK code is very old and uses ways that
today would not be used anymore. I don't want to go into detail here,
but I had discussions with Paul Davis, the Ardour Developer, who is
generally interested in Inline Notation, and currently with Denemo's
code its just too hard.  Its likely that writing your own Notation
Frontend in Reaper would be faster than reusing code. But all this is
not important. This is:

2. The License does not allow this. Denemo is GPL and Reaper is not nor
is it compatible. End of the story. From reading the reaper forum I know
the reaper community does know that, too, and one of the first
suggestions was that one could ask the Copyright-Holders to avoid the
GPL. However, is it not enough to ask Jeremiah alone or even the current
devs of Denemo (including contributed Scheme scripts) but its necessary
to ask all the people who ever contributed to Denemo because they are
the copyright holders all together. I don't want to go further here and
describe what happens if only one of the developer disagrees because
this will be too much text for one mail.

3. If I were GNU hardliner, and I do sympathise with the GNU philosophy
and Denemo is GNU, this should not be allowed. REAPER is unfree
software, it doesn't matter how cheap, free of charge, nice community
nice devs etc.  in the end its unfree. It is NOT "Audio Production
Without Limits" as Reaper claims. The limits are there and unacceptable.
If anyone wants to have a Audio/Midi Sequencer with Notation please make
your efforts an Ardour, QTractor or even Rosegarden if you like it
(<-Only my opinion) but don't waste your time with unfree software like
Reaper.

4. This needs further investigation, but assuming the Reaper guys are
really after "I want my recorded midi to be printed out as notation"
then you should forget it immediatly because you have the very basic
laws of physics against you. Midi -> Notation will never work really
because of entropy. More about this here:

 The opposite, "Make my Notation play nicely as MIDI", is possible but
you don't need Reaper for it but only Denemo (and some work on Denemo).


 These are my first thoughts. I like it that people want to improve
software in a community-driven way and I like it that there are people
who want to make music with notation and not only with piano-rolls, but
not Reaper.

 Nils