Re: [Sheflug] Music Notation Software

["Chris J" <cej [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

And Lo! The Great Prophet "zoebutler [at] tiscali.co.uk" uttered these words of wisdom:
> Hi there,
> 
> does anyone know of any Linux software that writes and plays musical
> notation - like Sibelius for example. I don't expect it to be as good as
> Sibelius. I just wondered if anyone had come across anything like that. I
> use Midisoft Desktop SheetMusic. It's nothing like as good as Sibelius. I
> would be happy to replace it with something that ran under Linux even if it
> wasn't as 'user friendly'. 


There's a few projects out there. There's three I've used to a greater or 
lesser extent in the past: 

MuSE (http://muse.serverkommune.de/) is a nice MIDI sequencer. I've not 
used it recently, but it did have a score. Downside is that it can be 
infuriatingly picky about its dependencies - it often keeps slap bang up to 
date with the latest versions of various libraries (including QT). I've 
never used any MuSE packages - always built from sources - so it may be a 
little less of a mare to install with packages :-)

Rosegarden (http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/) is another, but I've not tried
that in donkey's years. It looks a lot more advanced though these days.

Finally, there's Lilypond (http://www.lilypond.org/web/), which isn't 
graphical but it a music typesetter that can also produce MIDI output. It
takes music as defined in a text file and produces rather lovely scores.
I've played around with it quite recently, and the results can be seen at
http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/lilypond/

There are other projects, but from what I've been looking at, I'd say those 
three were the most advanced or at least useful/userfriendly/developed/
[insert suitable words].

Cheers,

Chris...

-- 
\ Chris Johnson                 \ NP: 03. Prokofiev - Peter And The Wolf - 
 \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk          \ The Wolf 
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  \ 
   \ http://redclaw.org.uk/        ~---------------------------------------


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