Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] Rosegarden vs. Note Edit
From: Chris Cannam (cannam_AT_all-day-breakfast.com)
Date: Sat Jun 14 2003 - 00:40:03 EEST
On Friday 13 Jun 2003 5:44 pm, Bearcat M. Sandor wrote:
> What makes one better than the other? I'm trying to figure out
> which one to install.
As a Rosegarden-4 developer, not only am I not impartial but also I'm
not a typical Rosegarden user and am not really a NoteEdit user at
all. So obviously I can't give you a user's perspective, but that's
not going to stop me! At least I can describe some of the intended
differences between the two, assuming you principally want to enter
and edit music as score.
The big obvious difference is that NoteEdit is intended to be purely a
score editor, while Rosegarden-4 is rather grandly intended to be
some kind of composition and performance tool, which basically means
a MIDI/audio sequencer that does score editing.
This means that NoteEdit supports quite a bit more score notation than
Rosegarden and makes a lot of it easier to use, but includes
play/record facilities only so far as they are directly helpful in
editing score, and sometimes makes them a bit obscure -- for example,
the first time I looked at it I never got as far as discovering that
it could import MIDI files, as that feature was not on the File menu
but instead on a menu obscurely labelled "TSE3" (the name of the MIDI
engine it uses).
Meanwhile, the implementation of some notation features in
Rosegarden-4 has been slowed by the problem of having to make them
editable and playable in formats other than notation and the fact
that the developers have to work on all sorts of stuff besides score.
(I say that with some bitterness, having wasted quite a bit of good
notation-coding time on tedious MIDI-device stuff recently.) For
example it can't even draw repeats on your barlines yet, let alone
segnos and first/second variations; the implementation of grace notes
is still very rudimentary; and nobody's got around to implementing
things like guitar tab yet. On the other hand, it includes handy
non-notation things like a matrix (pianoroll) editor, and can do cool
stuff like recording MIDI and then quantizing it only for the
notation editor without losing the original performance timings. And
it still does a reasonable amount of notation (including n-tuplets,
nonstandard noteheads etc).
Both of them allow you to enter notes with the mouse, PC keyboard, or
MIDI keyboard.
NoteEdit employs the paradigm in which it comes up with a blank score
at the start and you just keep inserting notes, and it starts a new
bar whenever it needs to (which is one reason why I think it may be
modelled on NoteWorthy Composer -- although I suppose it could be
modelled on Rosegarden-2.1). Rosegarden-4 expects you to define and
resize your staffs on an overview editor (in a sequencer style) and
stops you entering stuff into the notation editor when you reach the
end of a staff.
Both allow changes of time sig, key sig, clef etc and support the
usual accidentals.
Both allow you to see and edit several staffs at once.
Both can turn your dynamics into MIDI velocities, make tempo changes
during playback to match those in the composition, and so on.
Both do "proper" notation layout, in the sense that they don't just
stick the notes at positions proportional to their times and end up
with a complete mess as some sequencers do (MusE and Brahms for
example, if I remember correctly).
Neither of them does it as well as Sibelius or Finale.
Both can export MIDI and Lilypond files; NoteEdit can also export to
ABC, PMX and MusiXTeX, while Rosegarden can export Csound scorefiles,
MusicXML and Mup. (NoteEdit perhaps doesn't need to have Mup export
as its native file format is based on Mup anyway.) Rosegarden can
also print score direct from the application, though the results are
currently so bad you probably wouldn't want to.
Rosegarden is generally flashier -- antialiased notes, optional
textured backgrounds, nattier key signature and clef dialogs etc.
NoteEdit has (IMHO) some rather clunky menu and dialog layout: the
most painful bit of GUI (the use of the middle mouse button to insert
notes) has been fixed in the 2.1.x/2.2.x releases, but I can still
never work out how to do simple stuff like play from the somewhere in
the middle of the piece, while Rosegarden has a nice transport window
with all that kind of stuff in it, and can do things like playing a
selected region in a loop while you edit it.
NoteEdit has rather more complete help than Rosegarden, which of
course makes inexcusable that I don't know how to do basic stuff like
the foregoing with it. Rosegarden does have help, and the help for
notation isn't too bad, but it's not as finished.
NoteEdit's GUI comes in English, German, Italian, Slovak and Swedish;
Rosegarden's in English, German, Spanish, Russian and Welsh.
Both of them can still be annoyingly flaky at times. SuSE 8.2, which
is my preferred distro in most other ways, includes a version of
NoteEdit that crashes on startup if you have no MIDI devices and a
version of Rosegarden that can't play in the right time (though I
suspect that's SuSE's fault for building it with a buggy compiler).
And in the course of quickly researching this email I imported a few
MIDI files into the latest versions of both and tried displaying and
printing them via Lilypond; Rosegarden generally did a better job of
on-screen display (it looks nicer, and one of the files apparently
hung NoteEdit) but they actually both failed to produce Lilypond
output that Lilypond could immediately use: Rosegarden output an
unparseable hairpin, NoteEdit provoked a weird "Dimension too large"
error from LaTeX. (Joerg/Jan, I can send you details of the NoteEdit
problems if you like.) Of course that's no test of editing.
Rosegarden has a more obvious community about it, with active mailing
lists, bug trackers, apparently a greater number of casual
contributors. NoteEdit appears to be developed by a smaller number
of people with no dedicated mailing list etc. I'm not sure that
really makes any difference though. Both are actively worked on,
have been for some time, and probably will be for some time more.
And that's about all that comes to mind.
Hey, I rather enjoyed that. I wouldn't mind seeing a reply from one
of the NoteEdit developers, as I've probably inadvertantly slandered
them somewhere.
Chris
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