IMSLP Forums

Some happier news from the online sheet music world: Today, the Mutopia Project has reached the milestone of 1000 pieces. For those who don't know, Mutopia is a project for re-typesetting public domain music scores using the software LilyPond. Let's all contribute to making projects of this kind prosper, and may also our IMSLP be back soon greater than ever.

Hurrah! Congratulations to Mutopia!

i'm glad there are sites out there to help me when i need scores so badly. i think i got fauschingsschwank aus wien from there...or something i really wanted.

although i don't think any site would be as great as imslp. i wish i could help but a teenager doesn't really have power to do anything important but to just wait and hope that all goes well.

I would like to add that the quality of the engraving using the Lilypond software is quite good, better than some traditional music engraving techniques. The only downside of Lilypond is of course, a steep learning curve.

And I would add, despite the essay on the Lilypond website, I have still seen some fairly shoddy work generated from Lilypond, because the computer can only automate so much for you: typesetters still need to tweak a score for highest quality output.

PML

Yes, I agree with pml on that one. Sometimes, there will be overlaps or clashes between notes and dynamic/expression marks, and you have manually override or tweak this in order to produce a high quality score.

but don't the other wysiwig editors give the same collision errors with an ever uglier result? I only have experience with lilypond, so I wouldn't know.

As with all music engraving software, Lilypond's quality is highly dependent upon the skill and artistry of the individual engraver. I've seen a few nicely done scores on Mutopia, and a large number ranging from acceptable to dreadful. A set of parts was there at one point (it might still be for all I know) engraved by someone who had no concept of either multimeasure rests, of page turns, or cues - worse than useless.

Both Finale and Sibelius have much more flexibility than many realize in terms of the look and feel of a score. The key to good engraving with those programs lies in the ability and imagination needed to go beyond the default settings by using different fonts, changing default parameters for positioning various items, etc.

Perhaps the biggest challenge in using Lilypond is that, unlike music engraving softwares like Encore, Finale or Sibelius, the interface of Lilypond is text based rather than graphic based. Therefore, a text editor is required to input a set of commands or syntaxes and these are processed by Lilypond into a music score. What this means is that unlike graphic based engraving softwares where you can input the whole thing from start to finish in one go, in Lilypond you may have to stop after a time to review the output, which may be time consuming.

Both Finale and Sibelius have much more flexibility than many realize in terms of the look and feel of a score. The key to good engraving with those programs lies in the ability and imagination needed to go beyond the default settings by using different fonts, changing default parameters for positioning various items, etc.

I agree with this. With NoteWorthy (Far from engraving software) I do the same thing and manage to produce scores that are at least adequate for getting my compositions played. (P.S. great software, so quick and easy to use, only downside is that it is a bit limited).

I really don't like Sibelius, it is cumbersome and poorly thought out. Although I haven't used Finale much, the little that I have was much easier to use.

For me I like lilypond because of the monetary cost and because I get so frustrated with the user interfaces of most other programs. With lilypond I only have to be good at using a text editor. In my mind this is a strength. It hides most of the complexity until I need it. True you need to compile to check your work every once in a while, but it make me focus on the straight content before focusing on how it looks on the page. (I like LaTeX and don't like wysiwyg word processors for many of the same reasons.)

Without doing anything fancy, it usually gets a score 90% there. Of course the last 10% is the hard part. In the newest versions of lilypond the developers have reduced much of the pain by adding automatic collision resolution for expressive text and other nice features.

Still it doesn't totally protect against poor quality and it takes some work to make it presentable. The goal it to minimize this effort. It's not for everybody, but the price is right and it fits me well and I like to do what I can to support it: mostly bug reports and mutopia submissions (I'm always open to improvements).

That is also the reason why I'm holding out for the latest versions of Lilypond before using it. Most updated versions remove bugs that are present in previous versions. Of course, this is an ongoing process as newer versions will always come up to replace the older versions as well.

Mutopia now has 1038 pieces - one of their latest additions is a very nice typesetting of Schubert's "Psalm 23" (D706) for female choir and piano. (I was looking for that one!)

At this rate, they are becoming quite a respectable collection.

Aldona