42: Music composition progress

Music composition progress

In 42: Music composition struggles I detailed the problems trying to provide support to our sons composition competion entry.

The composition is now done. It is printed and burned on to audio CD.

But it has been a painful process.

The School use Sibelius which appears powerful, it is however, expensive and only available for windows. Still I have bought a copy of the student edition online. But you can't download it so we have had to wait for delivery (ordered Monday evening, arrived Thursday morning, not bad but not a single order processing update in that time).

On Richards suggestion we also tried Anvil Studio on Windows, this would have required a $19 add-on to export to WAV format. We found the user interface less attractive than Rosegarden so chose not to use this route.

On Linux we found that Noteedit had a nice interface and could play the midi diredctly, but we could not delete notes. So we gave up on that.

In the end we continued with Rosegarden, we could not get it to play midi directly which meant we had to export as midi to be able to hear the composition.
We also found it possible to confuse Rosegarden and get odd rests in the musical score.

The printing from Rosegarden is not very exciting so we tried using Lilypond. The results were beautiful but had a few problems. First Lilypond complained that some of the bars had too many notes in them. We could not find and fix this problem in Rosegarden as everything looked ok there. That meant that the layout went wrong after bar 40. Most of the text instructions on the score also got lost going into Lilypond. We will try this again in the future, I suspect that Lilypond is uncovering some oddities in the data that Rosegarden is ignoring. So working with Lilypond from an earlier stage would probably help as an auditing process for the data. In the end we had to accept the Rosegarden printouts due to lack of time.

Producing the Cd turned out to be the easiest part of the process. First Timidity converts the midi file to a wav [timidity file.midi file.wav]. Then you write a tiny cd table of contents and cdrdao burns it onto cd [cdrdao write cd.toc].

Gradually we want to move to a full digital audio workstation that will allow a wide variety of audio tasks including composition, recording and editing. So this was a good learning exercise. Even though the Linux tools are rather more complex and we have not got them all working yet it is still an attractive route as the cost savings from not needing to buy the windows software (Sibelius and Cubase for example) is enough to pay for much better studio hardware (eg firewire multi-channel mixer instead of USB single channel).

Posted on Thursday, May 25, 2006 at 10:27 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink