On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 17:23 +0200, pls wrote: > On 23.07.2013, at 15:03, Phil Holmes <m...@philholmes.net> wrote: > > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Shann" > > <richard.sh...@virgin.net> > > To: "Mats Bengtsson" <mats.bengts...@ee.kth.se> > > Cc: <lilypond-user@gnu.org> > > Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 1:06 PM > > Subject: Re: Comparing LilyPond with Sibelius, Finale, Musescore etc > >> > >> Well without considerable expense I can't really test Sibelius or > >> Finale, just report on what others have published in its name. They may > >> have hopeless skills in music typesetting. Where these comparisons are > >> strong is where the comparison is between two imports from MusicXML. If > >> anyone has access to the commercial programs and can do some MusicXML > >> imports then we could get an insight into the un-tweaked performance of > >> them. > What a coincidence: I was actually planning a blog entry comparing the > MusicXML-Import of various programs. > > > > I can import musicXML into the latest version of Sibelius (7) and report on > > its output if you want. > It would be great to collaborate! > > I'd recommend to standardize the comparison by using these sample files
I thought about this too: it has the advantage of being completely objective, which in a world full of advertising hype is a good thing; people would not have to take your word for it, they could try it themselves. HOWEVER ... > (both MusicXML and their corresponding PDF/PNG files) as reference files: > http://www.musicxml.com/music-in-musicxml/example-set/. They cover quite a > broad spectrum of music notation. I would simply open these files with > different applications and save the rendered scores each time as PDF files > without changing / tweaking anything. Then we can compare the resulting PDF > files. > > Of course this doesn't necessarily tell anything about the quality of music > engraving of the compared applications. It rather shows the quality of the > file format conversion of these programs. Yes, for this reason I suggest we do *not* do this, as it will distract attention from the main point that people do not understand, namely that just by inputting the music they want to play into LilyPond they can get a nicely playable score; whereas if they input the music into a drawing-based program they will have to position things by eye, using the mouse. (There is a secondary point, that if they alter the music in a LilyPond score the re-positioning of everything else takes place automatically, which often it will not with a drawing program). We will not help people by replacing this insight with observations about how bad musicxml2ly or, worse still Denemo's musicxml import is. Well, in fact they are not so bad, inasmuch as it would be self-defeating to import all manner of typesetting information into Denemo or LilyPond, these importers are there to save typing in reams of notes and durations basically. But, we will not communicate the main message this way. So what we need is some musicXML files which just contain some basic information, e.g. notes durations and markings the sort of thing someone might expect to type/click in to a program to tell it about the music they want. This would take some donkey work, though (potentially stripping out information about beaming, slur positioning ...), and it *may* not be needed. A first stab might be simply exporting scores from the commercial programs in musicXML and then reading them back. I did this with MuseScore http://denemo.org/compare#Example_2 and the gives a good insight into how much hand-tweaking is needed in MuseScore. This would not illustrate the point if Musescore exported more information to musicXML and imported more back and it may not work for other programs which may do this, but it *may* work just fine. Richard _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
