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Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

How do you use it for music composition?

I use it for lilypond for notation. I always considered it superior to Finale and Sibelius anyway. Not sure how it stacks up against the more modern commercial notation apps. But I love having a real trackable version history of my pieces.

What's also cool is the more advanced llms know lilypond and music theory too, so they can do things like... I don't know, check for counterpoint errors. I've used it with limited success to expand my jazz lead sheets into two-hand piano arrangements just for practice exercises.

I've considered using Lilypond, but I really like the autoplay feature in Musescore, as well as the lack of delay between placing notes and seeing the result.

there are plenty of text-based digital music notation systems. Then, you commit periodically as your composition evolves, and you can have all the history/fork/undo whatever that you might want.

Also, files don't have to be text-based at all to version them with Git. When you're versioning things for your own sake, there's often not much difference between keeping text and binary files there, as it's not like you'll have to resolve an unexpected conflict.

I find it really useful to be able to diff two commits, which if you're using a binary format is only possible if you have a meaningful-diff tool for that format. Some formats have one already created, more formats don't. (Though these days, an LLM might be able to produce something suitable).

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