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
