Slackware and Lilypond (...and Tex)
 

My wife and I are band directors. We both use Slack 10 on our travel/work machines. Recently we needed to write out about 6 pepband scores in time for this week's band camp. I was able to notate the scores using Noteedit, a KDE based music notation program. It worked quite well. Unfortunately, I ran into a snag that forced me to redo all of my scores in Finale 2001 on our Windows machine.

Noteedit does not have a native printing method (I sure wish it did!). Instead, files may be exported into different musical typeface formats such as Lilypond, abc and MusiXTex. Lilypond seems to be the more popular and more robust of the 3. I downloaded Lilypond as a Slack 9 tgz file and installed it on my machine. I would have compiled it from source, BUT the lilypond website suggests that since compilation is rather thorny, that users select a precompiled package. The Slack 9 package was the only Slack package available.

Here is my problem. I discussed this topic in a little less depth in a previous thread. One of the readers of this forum gave me a link to a file they had successfully compiled using Lilypond. That file compiled on my machine and returned NO errors. Unfortunately, every OTHER lilypond file that I have acquired off the net returns errors. Even the files I downloaded from a lilypond database of music. What is most disturbing is that ALL of my files I exported from Noteedit to lilypond return errors....even if the file contains 1 measure of music.

Has anyone here had success installing and using Lilypond and/or Noteedit?? Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!!

For those who may or may not know, Lilypond uses Tex as part of its compilation process. Perhaps someone with some Slack/Tex knowledge could chime in.

From noteedits's page (http://rnvs.informatik.tu-chemnitz.d.../noteedit.html)
"New in version 2.7.0 -> (seems to be) LilyPond-2.2.x compatible"

"Attention! If you use LilyPond-1.2 (or less) use the configure option:

������--with-oldlily

Otherwise the output is incorrect."

Maybe that's the reason of the errors.

EDIT: Maybe you want to try with MusiXTeX - http://icking-music-archive.org/soft...-for-unix.html

This is Noteedit section that took me to that MusiXTeX page: http://rnvs.informatik.tu-chemnitz.d..._appendix.html

According to what i read it produces the best printable output.

Abc homepage (Noteedit can export to it too): http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/

A good source of programs: http://linux-sound.org/ You have a Music Notation section there.

CONCLUTION: To get out of the hurry, you need http://moinejf.free.fr/abcm2ps-4.6.6.tar.gz that program, compile it, export your notes to ABC then convert them with that program to postscript and have a happy printing :)
After that you can keep trying to get MusiXTeX, i personally don't know anything about LateX related stuff, Lilypond or any music program so i can't help you further.
Another but tedious way would be to capture the window and printing that :P
Hope this helps.

I've read the Noteedit homepage a bunch of times. Unfortunately, a good bit of the help section is out of date. For example, the Lilypond instructions for producing a postscript file are incorrect (I checked with other Lilypond users). Lilypond 2.x uses "lilypond file.ly" to produce a printable output. I am curious if there are any Slackware users using Lilypond that could chime in. I heard that there maybe a conflict between Tex (as installed on Slackware) and Lilypond. I hope someone could shed some light on this.

I may consider installing MusiXTex instead, although Lilypond is more widely used.

I haven't used lilypond for a while (about a year) and that was just before I moved my system from Mandrake to Slackware. I have every intention of getting back in touch as it is a great program. I recall I was using version 1.7. There is a very active mailing list and I do recall there being Slackware users on it. Might be worth a look :)

All the best.

Lilypond's syntax is constantly evolving. Update to NoteEdit 2.7 which supports Lilypond 2.2.x.

I too use Slackware 10 with the precompiled Lilypond .tgz for Slackware 9. It works beautifully! I presume you installed it using Slackware's package tools: either installpkg, or pkgtool.

Sounds like FUD, or just a plain wild guess. I'd ignore this! If there *were* a conflict it would be because the Lilypond compilation for Slackware was done incorrectly rather than a fault of Slackware's TeX setup or even Lilypond generally.

BTW, it is best to stick to the pre-compiled binaries unless you are interested in the expermental/developmental side of Lilypond.

I don't know what NoteEdit's output for this format is like, maybe it would give good results. But if you are writing MusiXTeX from scratch or editing it then it is really painful! Be prepared to spend time tweaking slur lengths and beam angles, and still not get as good results! IMHO the syntax is uglier than lilypond's too ;-)

Thanks for your reply. I have been quite busy the last week or so. I helped my wife run her first band camp at her school. I spent all last week with the drumline. Needless to say, I SHOULD HAVE been wearing ear plugs. In addition to band camp I was VERY happily surprised by the school's principal. It turns out that I am the new assistant band director/Algebra/Geometry teacher. It has been a wonderful week!!!!

In any event, I originally had Noteedit 2.6.4 installed and then manually deleted the /opt/kde/apps/noteedit (something like that) folder prior to installing 2.7 from source. I am NOT certain that I don't have some older version of a file (or files) associated with 2.6.4 that never got overwritten by 2.7. I had deleted the tmp folder that I had compiled and installed 2.6.4 from. Sooooo, I couldn't run "make uninstall". After installing 2.7, I did make uninstall in hopes that it would wipe out some old files. Then I did make install AGAIN. I'm still having issues.

Is it possible that I have not totally rid my system of some Noteedit 2.6.4 files?

Need help! :)

I must be honest I'm not a noteedit user. Still I have slack/tex/lilypond experience and I've just had a go at installing noteedit. I went to the noteedit website, and found that they have released another two versions! Noteedit 2.7.0 apparently doesn't convert to lilypond 2.2 properly, but this has been fixed in 2.7.1. Then fixed some more in 2.7.2! So 2.7.0 is no good :rolleyes:

I've not got a version of noteedit to uninstall, but it looks like the files that could really clash between versions are in /opt/kde/share/apps/noteedit, so remove this entire directory. I recommend sending the whole directory to the trash within KDE. This should get rid of the lot.

Noteedit isn't near as scary as lilypond to compile, but its not a trivial install either. It requires a library called TSE3 but you've presumably already got it if you compiled 2.6.4. In fact, you probably can do ok from here. Slackware users are the best :D

After unpacking and changing into the 2.7.2 source directory, make sure you run:

./configure --prefix=/opt/kde

Personally I couldn't be bothered installing the TSE3 library it wanted so I did the following instead:

./configure --prefix=/opt/kde --without-libs

You probably won't want to do that, as it restricts the midi capabilities or something. Then run:

make
/bin/su
make install

The make takes a while on my old computer :o and it made a lot of warnings, but that doesn't matter. I could run /opt/kde/bin/noteedit. I then put a few notes into noteedit, exported to lilypond format. Then ran lilypond on noteedit's output. Worked :cool:

Rob
P.S. please excuse the excessive use of smileys ;)