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CommentAuthormikeecee
- CommentTimeFeb 5th 2008
Just curious, but whats the 'best' open source music sequencer/notation software. When i finally get round to putting linux on my pc, i want mostly open source software, hence the question. Also, everyone has Sibelius, i wanna be different
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CommentAuthorLolly
- CommentTimeFeb 6th 2008
Most people use Sibelius for a reason; for what it's good at (notating choral and orchestral music especially) it's the best there is, and there isn't any free open source equivalent with quite the same feature set. I can't cope without it, which is tethering me to Windows (or potentially Mac).
That's not to say that FOSS notation software doesn't exist, however. Lilypond produces excellent results but it is a text-based interface similar to LaTeX and despite what its creators claim it just isn't as flexible as Sibelius. There's no GUI and it won't play your music back to you so it's no use for composing.
The Sibelius community has been badgering the company for years now to produce a Linux version; even if we have to pay for it and the source is closed it would be better than nothing. It sort of works in WINE but there's no way to pass the MIDI controllers over through WINE so a MIDI keyboard wouldn't work. Also it doesn't render the windows properly and some things don't work at all. Virtualisation is no good either because VMware can't pass MIDI controllers easily to the guest OS (although if you have a USB one you might be OK).
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CommentAuthormikeecee
- CommentTimeFeb 6th 2008
yer i know why we all use sibelius, the capabilities of it are amazing! i just thought that with such a high demand for it (and soo many illegitimate copies around) somebody would have created a good competetor! if i had any idea of how to programme, i'd b up for trying to make one! but i dont
perhaps the members of spode's abode could rally together and create one
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CommentAuthorSpode
- CommentTimeFeb 6th 2008
I think equally as pressing, is that there aren't any decent open source video editors. I'm really hoping that improves in the near future.
I know a while back I searched through Yum (Fedora) for MIDI notation software and a couple of things came up, all graphical. My suggestion would be to do the same - you have Ubuntu dual booted at the moment don't you? So just have a look through Synaptic and see if anything comes up.
If that brings up nothing, have a search on SourceForge. But frankly, if it's not in Synaptic, it's probably not stable or good enough to consider using anyway.
MIDI is notoriously difficult to set up right without latency issues. Bit-Tech had a nice article about sound in Linux, and how in some cases in can be superior (here), worth a read if sound is something that interests you.
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