Music editing and printing
Ok, so I’ve got Rosegarden working now and I can play back the music I’ve entered using a soft synthesizer (QSynth) and everything’s working just fine.
I’ve spent a few minutes knocking together a quick two-part arrangement of a Christmas Carol for Dan and myself to play for the Santa Publicity Day in Retford (there’ll be more, but I have to start somewhere!).
Rosegarden will happily create a multi-line score, but it’s not Dan-friendly. Fortunately, Rosegarden will export Lilypond files. Lilypond is a GNU command-line application for music typesetting and will spit its output out in PDF or postscript format.
So, a few key presses later and this is the result:
Rosegarden should be able to preview and print direct using Lilypond, but for some reason, it isn’t. Not the end of the world because I just exported the file in Lilypond format and processed it on the command line:
david@server:~/Documents/Music> lilypond –pdf Little-Town-1.ly Little-Town-2.ly
(I had two files to process – one for each part and could combine them on the same command line).
So, concept to hard copy music and not a commercial pay-for bit of software in the loop anywhere.
