Introduction

Clément Soullard, 21/05/02

Last Modification : 25-Apr-2004

Goals

Alternate Take is an open source music Notation Software under the GPL licence. So far Sibelius, Finale, Encore, Igor Engraver does not have some serious challenger in the GNU world. It is time that this changes ! Althought, commercial software are not so well designed They remain like a corner stone and they keep expensive. Many piracy copy of those soft could be easely found and this is unsane.

The open source has already a few of those software but, according to me they suffer different drawbacks that cannot be fixed continuing on the same bases.

Those works already engaged in the music notation are :

• LilyPond : Is a very professional rendering engine. Even if it is confortable for some old user, I bet fewer and fewer users will accept the complex installation and use of Lylipond. Other serious lacks in this program :
  • There is no user interface. To correct this a GNULilypond user interface had been implemented. But this remains indirect.
  • It relies on old programs
    • Tex
    • LaTex
    • Flex (It has its own description language)
  • It is a two pass rendering (Do you MS-Word does one pass for 15 years )
• XEMO : A very ambitous project (Like Alternate Take), but nobody remains on the board after the first years had passed. Too bad...

The first aim of Alternate Take is to replace Lylipond for the rendering, and this is not a small challenge, because what Lylipond does, it does it very well. And to gives a clean interface for entering Scores.

Framework fo music

Especially because it is a complex task to make a music notation software, most of the attempts are done for basic needs at first, but as results come rapidly, shorts coming also come quickly, and this kind of soft will experiment great difficulties in adding some little features if the feature was not foreseen in the architecture conception of the software.

By providing with an heavy framework in the first design of Alternate Take, I tried to make Alternate Take comfortable for the programmer planning to put some extends to Alternate Take. Maybe it has some inconvenient because Alternate Take is a kind of "object programming facism" but it is a risk to take.

On the two goals I aimed, I only at the moment meet the flexible design needs, maybe time will simplify the program.