Lilypond is really stupid

I love open-source software. I regularly read slashdot.org. While I am a Windoze user, virtually everything I use regularly is open-source software, from Vim to OpenOffice.org to Firefox and Thunderbird to Pidgin. Open source software got me my first job out of college, where I was a network monitor and a programmer designing web applications with Perl.

Most stable open-source software that’s been around for a while is well-documented, and documented in ways that a programmer understands and appreciates. If, for example, one wants to see a list of functions available in PHP, you just go down to the function reference in the online manual, and voilà. If you want to see the syntax of a function, you can even go to http://php.net/(the function name), and boom, there it is, with usage examples and all.

Perl is much the same way, though without a centralized site that explains the language itself; instead, you buy a book from O’Reilly or take your chance with Google. (Usually a safe bet.) Or, Perl’s provided documentation works well, too. And certainly for using Perl modules, CPAN is a gem that explains everything in concise, clear terms. Lots of usage examples for the code that save buckets of time. (I don’t think I am the only programmer who learns more, and more quickly, from example code than from a prose explanation.)

The list goes on. MySQL has dev.mysql.com. Javascript has mozilla.org’s exaplanations and example code. The W3C DOM, HTML, and CSS all have w3.org’s specifications, which are surprisingly helpful. w3schools.com and other sites provide much help.


And then....*sigh*. There is Lilypond. A system for music notation designed by programmers who are also musicians. The output is very nice-looking usually, and you generally don’t have to spend the time futzing with making this note not overlap that note etc. that Finale makes you spend. It could be so nice.

But, you basically have to learn a programming language to use the thing. In other words, you don’t point-and-click notes/rests onto a staff the way you do with Finale; rather, you open up Notepad, Vim, emacs (God forbid!), or your other favorite text editor and create what is called a “source file”. The Lilypond program then takes that “source file” and turns it into a PDF that has your music in it.

That in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean there is a substantial learning curve. It also means there is no way to enter music via a MIDI keyboard, so it can take a while to enter a score. Again, not the worst thing, but it means the documentation should be helpful, as it is in the programming languages above described.

But the documentation for this thing is AWFUL. I mean BAD. If you want to look at a source for the various keywords and commands available to you, you are either a better geek than I, or you will search in vain ’cuz it ain’t there.

If you download the lilypond source for the Victoria “Conditor alme siderum” and then try to turn that source in the current Lilypond, it will tell you that this source file is for an old version of Lilypond, and you need to run a different program to update the file so that modern Lilypond knows what to do with it. Fine.

And....*barf*.

Lilypond will then tell you that it doesn’t know how to update this particular source file. A little bit of googling shows that certain commands are deprecated - of course, the Lilypond documentation doesn’t have a clear explanation, as any decent language would, of what the old command did and what has replaced it (preferably with sample code for both).

It took me several hours to figure out that what I needed to do was a mechanical update of the commands used for lyrics and an updating of the syntax for entering the lyrics themselves. This *could* have been done by the script. It *should* have been easy to find something on this in the documentation.

Oh well. At least the output is pretty. But I certainly can’t drop Finale, which lets me enter a score quickly (since I know it inside-and-out after 7 years now of using it) and in whose format I already have tons of music entered.