Thursday, December 4, 2008

LilyPond Rant

I love ranting. The other night, I was looking for some kind of free musical notation program, like Finale Notepad, but free. I googled it and came across LilyPond. It advertises itself with a warm (and false) slogan: "LilyPond...music notation for everyone." There are two things wrong it this statement. The first one is that it is music notation software. In reality, it is a program that allows one to print out sheet music which can be downloaded from their library. And by the way: "There are now 313 pieces of music avaliable!" In case you didn't catch it, that's nothing. That's only 28% of everything Bach ever wrote or half of all of Mozart's songs. But all that is naught compared to the true lie: "...music notation for everyone." After I downloaded it, it took well over 20 minutes just to install. This must be a nice application, or very graphically based, I think. So I open the folder I installed it to and I can't even find the app itself! I had to look online to find out that it was is ...usr\bin, buried amongst 50 or so .dll files. I open it up and...no GUI! The f***ing app that advertises itself as "...for everyone" has a command line interface! I promptly uninstalled it, a process which took 15-20 minutes. And even still, it didn't even delete anything. I deleted the folder myself, which took more like 15 or 20 seconds.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

hmmn that sucks

Anonymous said...

wow
...
is all i can say