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i'm an looking for a notation software that creates scores that do not look as computerish, but rather like the score by henle. what software would you suggest for this?

Zac

Lilypond is probably what you're looking for.

www.lilypond.org


Sibelius and Finale are both capable of more Henle-esque scores, but it requires tweaking the options a bit to your exact specifications.

i actually do already have sibelius at the moment. how do you "tweak" the options to do this?

Zac

It depends on what you mean by "less computerish." You can always drag individual elements to move them, or you can set global preferences in the Layout and House Style menus. (Layout changes the position and size of the staves, as well as page breaks, line breaks, etc. House Style changes the appearance and behavior of individual score elements.)

Something else you may consider is using a larger paper size. A4 and Letter size papers are a little smaller than most commercially printed scores.

It's called 'the hand'...time consuming, but works a dream as a crafted finished product...kind of like the best bottle of vintage french wine you might ever taste

i'm aweful at at writing out, though i am going to be writing out all my compositions and putting them in a leather book of some description so that i can hand down my handiwork through the generations. should be quite fun.

Zac

I second Kreisler's recommendation of Lilypond.

I never understood why people would go through such trouble to make finely crafted music and then ruin it by typesetting it with Finale or Sibelius.

Isn't the ease of part extraction when both score and parts are needed one of the main reasons one would use Finale or Sibelius? How does part extraction work in Lilypond? I took a friend's advice and went with Sibelius for this reason.

Heh, I don't use Lilypond for the exact opposite reason. Why spend so much time notating music when you can spend the time writing more?

I agree that Lilypond looks better than most Sibelius or Finale scores, but the results I can get from Sibelius or Finale are better than scores by Salabert, Durand, International, and some Schirmer.

Henle, Peters, Schott, and VU scores are very nice, though, and hard to beat.

In Lilypond, music is input as a text file, similar to a computer program. To write multi-part music, you define the parts separately, and then tell Lilypond to combine them together however you want. Thus, once the notes are entered, you could create scores for solo, pianoreduction, full score, you can transpose individual parts, whatever you want, with very little effort.

You can see some examples here:

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/examples

It's a little difficult to learn, which is probably it's main disadvantage, but once you learn it, it's incredibly powerful.

Well, I think Lilypond takes less time. I haven't used proprietary music notation software since the 90's, but the pointing-and-clicking to get notes on the staff that I remember was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had on a computer. Not to mention manually adjusting the Bezier curves for slurs and ties to look right. Maybe things have changed since then.

Actually, it's better to read their marketing material:

http://lilypond.org/web/switch/advantages

I have to do a lot of page layout stuff, add graphics, make worksheets, export graphics - all stuff that I'm sure is possible with Lilypond, but for which I'm uninterested in learning anew.

The best part is page layout. The wysiwig interface of Sibelius is very nice, and I like to be able to make my adjustments visually "on the fly." Since there are no frontends for Lilypond on MacOS, that's just something that isn't available to me yet. (Plus MIDI playback really helps when I'm trying to figure duets or things I can't otherwise play on one piano.)

I prefer Mup to Lilypond; it's a similar sort of thing, but the input language is easier. The scores don't look as nice as Lilypond, but they're still better than Finale. And Mup has MIDI playback.

So does Lilypond: it can generate a MIDI file from the input.

Is there a GUI to Lilypond for Windows? My trouble with its text inputting paradigm is that it requires me to think as a programmer and not a musician!

I wasn't aware that being a musician meant thinking in terms of pointing-and-clicking...

But, I couldn't find a GUI frontend for Windows, unfortunately.

Okay, so I hadn't meant to condemn everyone using Lilypond as not being a musician. Everyone has their preference, but for me I can't think of music as a string of letters and numbers: I do need the asthetics of seeing what I'm getting to keep going Not everyone will feel this, but personally when I write something I think sound good, it will also look pretty on the score. Psychology? Maybe, but it works for me!

But that's a shame about no GUI frontend for Windows. Lilypond scores look really pleasing to the eye.

Having said that, I'm considering hand-engraving my music!

Think of it this way:

Pointing and clicking has a very small learning curve.

Programming, by comparison, has a very large learning curve, especially if you don't have any previous experience with a computer language.

For me, pointing-and-clicking (actually, in my case it's touch-typing: I use the Speedy Entry Tool which is integral to Finale) gives instant gratification: you see the score updated as you go along. If I understand correctly, Lilypond - like LaTeX - requires you to "compile" your source code every time you want to view the finished product.

See my problem? The real-time musical sense that comes from the image of the score and which assists editing so immensely is robbed away in the text-based paradigm.

Presumably there are people who use Lilypond only to engrave the final product, and those who use it for actually composing. I guess that the fact that I know people who do the latter there must be another way of obtaining the musical bearing in a sea of text!