This project is tied very strongly to Lilypond, the GNU music
typesetter (http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/hanwen/lilypond/) and its
mudela file format. Even so, the program has been written with
flexibility in mind should anyone want to extend it to deal with other
file formats.

So, Lilypond is a reasonably full-featured music typesetting package;
what's the particular advantage to making this GUI shell for dealing
with it?

Well, this is what it is for me: I find it a mite difficult to compose
or arrange with emacs. I mean, Mozart wouldn't have had a problem with
it, but I'm not that talented -- it's very, very helpful to me if I
can actually see the music that I'm developing as it gets
developed. Not on the large scale -- no GUI notation program that I
know of really lets you see enough of the score at once to plan things
in the large -- but it's certainly very useful for tinkering with
lines and voicings and what instrument gets what and so on.

GUI notation tools are also pretty good for entering music quickly if
you have a midi keyboard; just plunk down the notes on the midi
keyboard with the right hand and enter durations with the left. (Of
course, I don't have a midi keyboard myself, but from what I
understand this feature allows one to enter a part quite rapidly.)

Programs like Finale, for all of their faults, are still pretty good
at letting the user do things like that.

So, that's what this program sets out to do: to let you develop your
musical thoughts in a graphical environment.

And it'll let you use a keyboard for note entry once I find someone
else to write that module or someone sets me up with a donated midi
keyboard. :)


