RE: Music Notation

[Ted Harding]

On 05-Feb-01 Steven R. Baker wrote:
> I'm in the process of writing a package for notating music in Lout.
> Yes, I know there exists GNU Lilypond, and I've used that, but it's
> LaTeX based, and I want to wipe the stain of TeX from my system.

While it may depend on what you want to notate, I would nevertheless
strongly suggest looking at software which handles musical notation
properly, rather than making a package which simply allows you to
plant musical notation "by hand" at chosen positions on the page
(of course, the package you are developing may do just that ... ).

The reason is that (just as troff, TeX, Lout and other typesetting
packages encapsulate a great deal of knowledge about document
layout in their code) proper music-notation packages encapsulate
a lot of musical expertise and "look after" most of the details
of layout and convention.

As well as Lilypond and MusixTeX, there is also rosegarden (a GUI
based package) which once looked as though it was really going
places but which has for some time been dormant at a semi-complete
and somewhat buggy stage. It seems it is currently being
completely re-written.

The package I use for all my music jobs is MUP, for which see

  http://www.arkkra.com

It is "shareware" and you are expected to pay $25 to "unlock"
it into a version which does not print a background watermark.
But I reckon it is worth it for the quality and flexibility.

As well as outputting somewhat primitive MIDI files, its primary
purpose is to generate PostScript output. You can then either
print this as score sheets or import it as EPS (e.g. for
including sample music passages in text). The results are very
good indeed.

Hoping this helps,
Ted.

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Date: 05-Feb-01                                       Time: 10:45:57
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