A long while back, I set out to do a complete rewrite of Wheat’s BassBook and publish it as a dead trees book. That project got back burnered pretty quickly. But, now that I’ve slowing unpacking my backups, I discovered that I’d done a good bit more work on it than I had previously thought. So, I spent some time trying to get the iMac set up to resume work on it. But it turns out I’ll have to wait until the folks who make LilyPond fix some issues with it (some of which are OS X-specific, and some of which are not).
LilyPond is a super-groovy command-line program that parses text files into beautifully written music. It can handle tablature as well as standard notation. It can spit out your music as MIDI, PDF, PNG, and Postscript. This is all great. It takes some time to learn the rather arcane code that you use to create your music (there is no GUI). But, once you get it down, you just fire off a command with a bunch of switches to tell the LilyPond program what output formats you want.
All the files I created back when I was actively working on the project were in Lilypond version 2.6.0. The app is now at 2.10.33, but there are issues with the OS X version for Intel boxes. So you have to use the PowerPC version. There is a minimal GUI to the OS X version (basically a text editor window and some menu bar items for compilation). That’s all broken. But I found out you can run it at the command line, which is what I was used to anyway. Further testing and research turned up a bug in the way it renders tablature, which is just broken in the latest version (though it worked fine back in 2.6).
I was also stoked that there’s a LilyPond integration tool for OpenOffice (which also works in NeoOffice) called OOoLilyPond. It works great for certain music examples, but it didn’t like my LilyPond files. With a little hacking, I managed to chop away the offensive parts, but, LilyPond’s tablature bug is still the sticking point. And I’m not sure I want to massage all my LilyPond files in order to make the work in NeoOffice. And, in either case, I’d have to process them separately to get the MIDI output, which defeats the purpose of integrating the two. And, besides that, the text editor in OOoLilyPond is lacking in basic features, like line numbering and mouse wheel/ball support.
So, though I certainly appreciate the efforts of these various open source projects, as an end user, I’m stuck with either waiting for fixes or going with a proprietary option, like Tablatures (easy to use, but fairly low-quality output) or GuitarPro (which I’m checking out today).