Notation Software

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Wednesday 21 November 2007, RoLo wrote:
> I've  been using Finale for notation, I already use it using wine, but
> would like to know if you guys can describe the process for composing (I
> mean which software you use). I'm just starting to make audio on Linux.

Linux notation software falls into roughly three categories:

Rosegarden:

There is Rosegarden at the top of my list, because I use it, and have been 
working there for years.  However, I have been thinking about buying a copy 
of Windows (or a Mac and OS-X) and Finale or Sibelius for years too, so I 
think I can be pretty fair looking at both sides of our application.  There 
are good things about it, and things I hate, and fixing the things I hate is 
a never-ending struggle.

What makes Rosegarden so hard as a notation package, and so different from 
anything in the commercial realm, is that it tries to be a true hybrid MIDI 
sequencer and score editor.  It lacks several features considered important 
by MIDI purists, and it lacks I think even more features important to 
composers.  You can't do proper percussion notation, grace notes have been 
broken forever, dealing with multiple voices is still unwieldy, it's not 
possible to do much in the way of staff groupings, or printing certain staffs 
at different sizes.  Several features (segno, coda, different barline types, 
etc.) are only implemented as unwieldy LilyPond export directives (because 
adding them as proper native features would have taken vastly, vastly more 
time, and this is much better than nothing.)

Most of all, getting any music to play is much harder with Rosegarden, and it 
seems to frustrate every new user who intends to use Rosegarden for notation.  
We are a sequencer too, and we have to be both things, so we just can't make 
the same sort of compromises that pure notation packages do without 
fundamentally changing our nature.  This means you have to have something of 
a MIDI user's knowledge of how it all works, even though you just want to 
pick a damn trumpet out of the list, and have it play a fake trumpet.

In the balance of compromises though, one thing we do that nobody else can do 
is that we (within the limitations of what is possible) are the only 
application I know of that lets you have crisp, legible notation at the same 
time as you have a human-sounding, non-mechanical playback performance.  We 
actually keep two different versions of every note, one for playback, and one 
for display.  We also have trigger notes that allow you to write ornaments 
cleanly, and yet still specify exactly how they are performed.  It think it 
is a really exciting concept, if only we ever had time to really close the 
last gap, and fill in these remaining limitations.  It is MUCH harder to 
implement something like a DS al Coda inside Rosegarden than it would be in a 
purely notation-driven application though, and we have been struggling to 
push the limits of our model for years.  We think everything is technically 
possible, but many of these missing features are so difficult to get right 
that they remain as yet unfinished.

Notation-driven GUI Editors:

This is NoteEdit/Canorus (I'm not sure what the status of this project is, or 
which if either of those is currently under active development) and mScore 
(the notation spin-off of MuSE.)  Both of these are notation-based, rather 
than MIDI based.  You draw a quarter note on a trumpet staff, and the 
application converts that into a rude MIDI approximation for you.  You have 
little or no control over the MIDI, but you don't have to fuss with so many 
details, and many things (eg. DS al Coda) are so much easier to implement in 
this kind of context.

I would be a NoteEdit user myself, instead of a Rosegarden developer, but 
since long ago it has always seemed like the application that ought to feel 
most suitable for my purposes, and yet didn't actually work out.  I've never 
managed to accomplish anything with it, I'm afraid.  I wound up putting my 
money on Rosegarden, even with all its other, different frustrations.  Plus 
Rosegarden has IMHO a vastly more friendly notation entry interface.

mScore is/was supposed to be patterned after Sibelius.  It builds a soft synth 
into itself, and comes bundled with a soundfont, so you never have to worry 
about noise problems.  When I last looked at this, it seemed very promising, 
but very rudimentary and not yet really usable for anything at all.  I 
haven't looked at it in quite some time, but Ubuntu Feisty doesn't have any 
packages (of this or Canorus either one), so I don't take this as an 
encouraging sign that it has come a long way in the last while.


LilyPond:

LilyPond renders very good notation using a kind of text scripting language.  
It's hard to imagine anything further from Finale than LilyPond, but I think 
LilyPond's output looks MUCH better than any other computer-generated 
notation I've seen.  They have put a great deal of effort into producing 
beautiful notation, and they have succeeded in large measure.

The problem with LilyPond is you have to learn a complicated language to make 
full use of it.

LilyPond front-ends:

For the user who wants to avail herself of the beauty of LilyPond without the 
foreign language aspects, it is possible to use graphical front-ends.  Thanks 
especially to Heikki Junes, Rosegarden now does such a good job of exporting 
to LilyPond that we are making it the only print engine in the near future.  
Somewhere in the middle is Denemo, which is a graphical front-end that's 
aimed at someone who understands the underlying LilyPond syntax, and who 
wants a helper.  It's kind of like Rosegarden is the OpenOffice.org of 
LilyPond.  It's a quasi WYSIWYG editor that doesn't produce very nice 
LilyPond code.  Denemo is more of a Bluefish kind of editor that helps 
someone who knows HTML write code more easily.

That's kind of a nutshell summary.  Actually, this message is just expansive 
enough that I feel like I ought to go back and do a better job all around, or 
I should have made it much shorter.  It almost suggests we need some kind of 
notation HOWTO with links and comparative up to date reviews of the current 
state of all these applications.  (I settled on Rosegarden in 2002, and I 
haven't paid more than token attention to anything else since then, but I 
don't want to come off like all these other projects are worthless.  They're 
not.  Though I do have doubts about whether any of the other projects are 
actually as usable as Rosegarden yet.  We ALL have problems, but I think 
Rosegarden is the most finished in the spectrum of half-complete offerings.)
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre