MuseScore 4.1 is now available
musescore.org
musescore.org
My dad wrote an opera using LilyPond in vim, though I believe these days he's actually doing more with supercollider, which skips sheetmusic and goes right to sounds: https://supercollider.github.io/
Also as a programmer, Lilypond is programmable, and nearly infinitely customizable (similar to tex). I love that I can write some style information in a "header" and include it in every score. In my current project I am writing a lot of SATB choral songs in book format. But I also want to do a melody only edition. Just tweaking a header file, I can hide all the other voices, no problem.
(I also use Musescore, which I prefer for composition or simple projects. But when I want to output a large finished product, I always go back to Lilypond.)
XML files are often of that kind, but not only. Many years ago I worked with a FORTRAN derived file format which from the outset should be ideal for git. In reality the files were several gigabytes and for most of them the ordering of the lines was insignificant[1]. Not only is git not particularly good with very large files (it certainly wasn't back then), diffing and merging files where several hundreds of millions of lines jump around arbitrarily is practically impossible.
[1] This was a deliberate design decision of the language. When it was conceived it was still usually punched on physical paper cards. One 80 character line used to be one punch card. Card decks sometimes fell to the ground and got all mixed up. A language that doesn't require a particular ordering of the cards (=lines) is kind of practical in real world scenarios. Of course millions of cards is not, so the point was kind of moot, but there we were.
There's definitely room for something that bridges the advantages of the different approaches, but it's a difficult problem and it's a $0 billion market, so having passionate people make MuseScore better is probably the best path forward.
It requires a tablet and pencil/stylus, and it’s a bit pricey. But I’ve found the handwritten interface, once I got used to it, to be fairly intuitive.
My still-early impression of StaffPad is that it is best for writing scores in a traditional, classical-like format, and detailed knowledge of standard music notation seems to be necessary. It might not be suitable for people who are more comfortable composing with keyboards, rhythm machines, digital audio workstations, etc.
I learned how to write music 50 years ago on paper. Compared to that, this software is a huge advance. Being able to edit scores easily and hear what I write played back is wonderful.
On the editorial side, LilyPond is an incredible tool for creating modern editions of earlier music, specifically music in mensural notation. It comes with common glyphs and has full ligature support, and the separation of content and presentation means that one can reproduce the look of early manuscripts and prints while generating a modern score from the same source file. This has been really great at reducing transcription errors by easing the mental burden of transcription, transposition and note reduction, which can all be handled automatically by LilyPond. It's not perfect, but miles ahead of any alternative.
What older people on the extreme of some skill think about the skill is not necessarily applicable to 99.9% of us.
from this pursuit, I've come to realize that "sheet music" is just the only technologically available way to store the music back in the day. a practice which had an entire publishing and printing industry around it; this is how composers in the 19th century made money
BUT THEN, sound recording technology made that be somewhat obsolete, and then synthesizers and computers came and made music writing notation be less and less capable of keeping up the pace of musical technology innovation.
all in all, I'm considering that what if I say that PCM is a writing and start 'handing down music' directly as 0s and 1s in at a 16 bit depth (two bytes per sample) at a 44100 samples per second?
then again that's cumbersome, so the super collider code (and everything needed to run it) IS now the 'music notation' which includes a description of the instrument as well as the song/the music. (traditional written sheet music notation does not really include a description of the instrument beyond a reference by name)
this also "turns" the music interpreter into a digital to analog converter. lol
CSound is akin to a badly written assembly language for audio synthesis and processing.
SuperCollider (or more precisely, SClang) is more like Lisp for audio synthesis and processing.
One important difference is that the designer of SClang understand roughly 1000% more about programming languages than the designer of CSound (who was a visionary person, but who really didn't understand programming languages).
A composition, to varying degrees depending on the composer, leaves various degrees of freedom for the performance. So the PCM encoding of a performance is entirely different to the composition ... conceptually.
However, a good musician may be able to listen to the PCM encoding (aka "digital audio") and from that frame their own understanding of the composition, thus leading to a new performance.
So .. it's complicated.
I am interested in music in contrast with the broader "sound art"; then again I don't even know what the heck this 'difference' between these even means
- [1]: https://abcnotation.com
- [2]: https://obsidian.md
(But Lilypond is hard, harder than writing documents in LaTeX for example.)
It's very much like with kerning - once you see a sheet with decent alignment, you can't unsee it.
His video on how Sibelius' UX is a pile of shit remains one of my favourite vids on yt: https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI
Have things cooled down now?
The products are completely separate
You can get it without charge from just about any and every Linux distribution.
You can get the source code without charge from ardour.org/download (or from our mirror repo on github).
You can get it (legally) without charge from anybody else who already has it.
The only thing you cannot do is to get a ready-to-run binary without charge from ardour.org itself. You can opt to pay as little as US$1 for that, however.
Edit: added "(or greater)" :)
Also note that only a few linux distros are bleeding-edge (such as Arch-Linux, which will contain binaries for newly released package versions pretty quickly). But if you are on a non-bleeding edge linux distro, your distro's repos aren't kept up-to-date and so the advantage of the Ardour binary download is you get an up-to-date package without having to install a 3rd-party repo or build it yourself.
And we aim to release every 2 months.
People who pay monthly also get access to nightly builds, allowing them to test things out before release (useful for us, sometimes useful for them). Most of our alpha/beta testers, however, build it themselves, from source.
As I’ve said, its downloads are. E.g. here: https://community.ardour.org/download?architecture=x86_64&ty...
> The only thing you cannot do is to get a ready-to-run binary without charge from ardour.org itself.
This is what I’m referring to as a paywall.
For a casual Windows user, source code or Linux repositories are unhelpful, as the website itself states.
> You can opt to pay as little as US$1 for that, however.
A low paywall is still a paywall.
The Ardour "paywall" does not do that.
You may not like the "cost" of the alternative (e.g. finding someone else who already has the Windows version, or learning to build it yourself, or getting someone else to build it for you), but those costs are, I would claim, not part of the "paywall".
If you had said "ardour.org doesn't offer ready-to-run binaries unless you pay something for them", I would not even have commented.
You're saying "oh, well, they don't provide no-charge downloads, so it's paywalled" is a comment that to me basically ignores what makes libre software libre software.
I'd say the opposite is true, you can put content behind a paywall in one place, even if it is freely (libre and/or gratis) available elsewhere. Wikipedia has a page called "List of public domain resources behind a paywall" [1], this seems a nice example. To me Ardour binaries are another.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_domain_resource... .
Are the sunflowers "behind a paywall" in any functional sense? Does the fact that one possible place to get them requires payment mean anything when they are available at no cost elsewhere?
The functional sense seems very relative. For people who cannot go further, all sunflowers are behind a paywall. For people who can, it’s just that, i.e. they also have access to sunflowers not behind a paywall.
To be clear, I’d say the resident on the left (or Ardour for that matter) is in no way worse because they’re offering paid sunflowers. They have every right to do so. And something must be good about their offer if people are buying from them (location, authority, desire to support their business, perhaps all of the above).
Also the "locking downloads behind a paywall" only applies to scores that users have uploaded to musical score social media sharing site musescore.com, but the desktop program MuseScore binaries are available for free on Win, Mac, Linux, BSDs via https://musescore.org/en/download. You can anyway post your scores anywhere for free. And there may be proprietary VSTs that you can pay to download via MuseHub, but MuseScore's baseline audio synthesis (as well as any free soundfonts you can freely download) are free.
Musescore the company is a disaster. They took my money for a Pro subscription, without delivering the actual benefits. Their support organization is, as far as I can tell, nonexistent. After six months of trying, I have yet to find a way to get them to respond to my request for support.
That said, I never noticed any input lag in the first place. Though I use an M1, not sure what the parent uses...
I have no background in authoring sheet music so my sense is that this is just me and my whole mental model is probably wrong.
Did anyone else experience this? Or did anyone else find it to be the opposite: super intuitive and smooth?
Pro tip: With your left hand centered on asdf, you can easily access the most important stuff (note pitches abcdefg and note durations 123456).
Probably, if you mean 4+ which is significantly intuitive with certain big changes. 3 and earlier was a lot more unituitive.
Note that all the industry-standard alternatives (except the relative newcomer Dorico) are much much less intuitive, and not because of the domain complexity of sheet music, but because of bad UI.
Plus, they have a ton of non-PD scores for which they don't pay licenses. They just grab the money.
Chrome on Android.