What Is a Music Engraver? (2016) | Hacker News Reader

What Is a Music Engraver? (2016)

flypaper.soundfly.com

40 pointsTomte19 comments

Of course, since it’s from 2016, it doesn’t mention Dorico, which is the third “big” program alongside Sibelius and Finale. Avid, the owners of Sibelius, laid off most of the core Sibelius developers in 2012, and they were later hired by Steinberg, who now produces Dorico.

IMO this is a pretty smart move by Steinberg, who make Cubase, which is one of the main DAWs used for scoring (and sheet music is still important for scoring). The other DAW commonly used for scoring is Logic.

I ended up purchasing a copy of Dorico Elements. I’m fairly happy with it, but I’ve only ever used Logic, Lilypond, and staff paper to write music before.

It also doesn't mention SCORE[1], which is apparently still big among the more conservative music publishers[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCORE_(software)

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGo4PJd1lng

A good rundown of the history of Sibelius, Avid and Dorico is included in this video: https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI

Dorico is a really fantastic piece of software. Lilypond is great for engraving but pretty bad for composing. Sibelius is great for composing but I never liked engraving in it. Dorico is a happy medium, in that it separates the composing workflow from the engraving workflow. They use different interfaces, because they are different tasks.

Don't use finale. I did professional engraving in it (for works that were composed using it), and it is a broken buggy nightmare. IIRC, one of my then-employer's clients sued the company that maintains it, because opening a file in a later version of Final resulted in carefully-placed dynamics, text, and articulations moving to different locations. Dozens of hours of lost work.

What about Lilypond?

"LilyPond is a music engraving program, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. It brings the aesthetics of traditionally engraved music to computer printouts. LilyPond is free software and part of the GNU Project. "

Also Frescobaldi which works on top of Lilypond.

https://lilypond.org/ https://frescobaldi.org/

yeah, i dig it. kind of a pain at times tho

I'm surprised that i didn't see Musescore on there. Of all the Linux engraving programs it has become my favorite for getting a idea out of my mind and into my ears when its to complicated to play at speed.

Such as this: https://youtu.be/IsNzHpYnIPk

Getting an idea out of your head and into notation isn’t “engraving”. Think of it like the difference between using a word processor and using page layout software. The article is also from 2016. MuseScore was around back then, but it was pretty rough to use.

What I love about Musescore is the “jazz” font. My father’s a composer (and at some point did fairly elaborate symphonic type work) and used Encore, Sibelius and Finale — and I think I have some kind of musical notation dyslexia that I can finally read at ease in the “jazz” font.

I’ve written a sheet music rendering engine from scratch in front-end JS, and here’s a tech talk I gave on it:

https://vimeo.com/304099149

This is part of the music-learning software Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/). We have a full notation/tab editor plus lots of learning and practice tools, oriented around syncing sheet music with real audio/video performances.

The anti-aliasing of the example scores on https://www.soundslice.com/features/ makes horizontal lines look extremely blurry. It's not as bad for vertical ones.

Interesting — can I assume you're not on a high-pixel density (aka "retina") screen? We've experimented with forcing staff lines to start on a new pixel, but that can result in an overly digital look.

Yes, I've noticed this on a regular QHD display. Zooming in on a screenshot shows that the staff lines aren't black at all though. It's one line #9A9A9A, one #545454 and one #E5E5E5.

I used to use maestro on the phone, but it gets cumbersome. Once you get the system, lilypond is nice - you're typing, get validation. The system is incredibly complete, but a bit complex, and sometimes it feels a bit far from the sheet. I miss being able to get something out of my head, so I hum it into the mic, but it ain't the same. The midi rendition is nice to validate you got the timing right, but it's the entire piece everytime, hard to judge just a bit. Frescobaldi on top is great. Overall, I salute the work, does the job well, don't think I'll move soon.

Sibelius attracts you with a "starting at $19.99" which sounds reasonable for software, until you realize that it is a monthly fee, justified by cloud storage (who cares about that at this stage, give me dropbox/onedrive connector and I'll be happy rather than disseminating my stuff across everyone's greedy cloud storages) and updates. You can't buy a perpetual license. This is a disease, by principle I will never buy that shit.

Finale seems to be perpetual license with an upgrade system, which I salute. It took a lot of digging to find the price, and... $600 it is. So it's a professional software and they don't have a personal use tier.

So, lilypond it is.

Dorico has “Dorico Elements” which is $100 and a perpetual license. I’m running an older version of it. I’m still trying to figure out my workflow for songwriting. It’s sometimes DAW -> notation -> DAW. Get ideas out in the DAW, notate them so I can get a better grip on what I’m writing and “fix” my decisions in place, then export to MIDI and replace the tracks with performances one by one in the DAW.

I used to use Lilypond, but the friction was there and I never really stuck with it.

I'd never really thought about how much goes into this, but spent time reading Daniel Spreadbury's excellent blog [1] about it, which predated the publication of Dorico. I'd suggest starting from page 5, as it obviously becomes more product-orientated later on, but the early parts in particular were really enlightening in terms of both music notation and how difficult some programming tasks can be (for me, at least!)

[1] https://blog.dorico.com/making-notes/

Not mentioned in the article, but a couple of notable open-source libraries for rendering music notation in the browser:

A JavaScript library for rendering music notation and guitar tablature - https://github.com/0xfe/vexflow

OpenSheetMusicDisplay renders sheet music in MusicXML format - https://github.com/opensheetmusicdisplay/opensheetmusicdispl...

If you want to see the physical process from start to end, check out this (German) documentary about Hans Kühner, Germany's last music engraver:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7-3r99Fng

Related and interesting: What is a (fountain pen) music nib? https://unsharpen.com/fountain-pen-help-what-is-a-music-nib/

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