Hi David, Unfortunately, this just is a significant workflow shortcoming of composing in Lilypond. For me, it is outweighed by the workflow benefits of Lilypond, the most important of which is that, since the files are all plain text, it enables me to use Git to manage my composition projects.
When starting a new project, I would suggest initially setting up every instrument with something like R1*32 R1*32 R1*32 R1*32 rather than a single R1*x for the entire duration. The actual lengths are arbitrary since you will probably change them as you go, but the point is that by doing this, you give yourself a way to work on different sections of the piece before you've written everything in between. Any time you add music to an instrument, subtract from the rests however many measures you wrote. That way you will always have easy to find landmarks in the code for each instrument that sync up at the boundaries of the sections, as initially defined by the groups of rests. It helps to always stick to one measure = one line of code, unless it would be excessively long, with a bar check at the end of every measure. \overrides and such should go on separate lines. Generally speaking the examples in the Lilypond documentation follow these practices and are a good model for style. You're going to get very good at mental arithmetic adding and subtracting measures in large Lilypond scores, I'm afraid. (: Saul On Fri, Sep 27, 2024 at 2:53 PM David Bellows <davebell...@gmail.com> wrote: > This is a question that came up on Reddit the other day and I didn't > have an answer (it never happens to me). > > Say you are working on a score with multiple parts (like an orchestra) > and you need to insert some measures into all the parts somewhere in > the middle of the piece. Is there a way to organize things to minimize > the hassle? Having to go to each file for each part and insert the > measures would be a huge pain especially when compared to how > relatively easy this is for other notation programs (so I'm told). And > if you have to do this more than once then it's especially cumbersome. > > I know with some editors you can search and replace multiple files at > once but this feels like it would mess up any internal organization > with respect to bar numbers in the LilyPond file (in the comments). > > I understand that many people only use LilyPond for engraving so this > isn't a problem for them, but there are those of us who compose > directly in LilyPond and this could be a potential issue. > > I guess I'm wondering if there is a way of writing your LilyPond files > in such a way to make this easier than just manually going through > each part and changing them. > >
