Is Rosegarden Suitable for Piano Players?

[km4hr]

I've been investigating Rosegarden for several weeks to see if it meets my needs. I want to use the notation editor to enter piano music so that it can be played through a synth. So far I've compiled and installed the latest stable version (14.?). The software runs fine. But I haven't been able to achieve my objective with the notation editor. In fact, I'm pretty darn frustrated with it.

I've spent many hours trying to learn how to enter music into Rosegarden using the notation editor. To my disappointment I seem to have hit a wall. I've almost concluded that Rosegarden is practically incapable of handling music than contains multiple voices on the same staff, such as is common in modern piano music. Is this correct? Or do I just need to keep trying? I want to avoid wasting any more time if this capability is not there.

My experience seems to be confirmed in section 8.3.4.7 of this reference. It states, "Rosegarden cannot handle situations involving multiple musical lines written on the same staff very well at all"... "the notation editor will never produce good results attempting to interpret data like this into legible notation."

The reference goes on to say, "Part writing is one of the most often-requested features, and is almost certain to be implemented in some fashion at some point in the future."

The reference is not dated, so I can't tell when it was written. Has anything been done recently to effectively address this issue? Or is Rosegarden a tool for musicians that play monochromatic (one note at a time) instruments?

I wonder if there are very many (non-classical) piano players out there using Rosegarden? If so, how do they use it? Are there ".rg" files available somewhere that might demonstrate what others have been able to accomplish?

Is there a better application for accomplishing my objective?

thanks!

[bluebell]

On the mailing list there are some people who use the notation editor. You'll probably get some help there.
rosegard-user should be the right one.

See http://sourceforge.net/p/rosegarden/mailman/

[km4hr]

bluebell,

Thanks for recommending the Rosegarden mailing list. I sent a email to the list but I haven't seen any evidence that it was received.

I can write C programs and compile and link software but I don't understand how to use mailing lists. I avoid them them when I can. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

[bluebell]

There is a link to subscribe to rosegarden-user:
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/list ... arden-user

That's the first step. Be sure to peek into your junk folder as well afterwards. You'll get a mail with instructions for your subscription.

[DepreTux]

I hit the same problem trying to write parts on rosegarden. AFAIK, your best choice to music notation on linux is to use some lilypond frontend (or lilypond itself) since it has advanced voice handling features. All the rest of the linux score editors I've tried so far fail on that front except for lilypond (musescore, nted, canorus, and some others I don't remember).

I use frescobaldi to write my parts. The parts will print as pdf or svg graphics, but lilypond's midi capabilities are somewhat limited if you are planing to use it to hear your music.

Check it out yourself:

http://www.lilypond.org
http://frescobaldi.org/

Good luck and report back if you find anything suiting your needs!

[raboof]

I hit the same problem trying to write parts on rosegarden. AFAIK, your best choice to music notation on linux is to use some lilypond frontend (or lilypond itself) since it has advanced voice handling features. All the rest of the linux score editors I've tried so far fail on that front except for lilypond (musescore, nted, canorus, and some others I don't remember).

I agree lilypond is still king when it comes to printing music (allthough one of my pet peeves with it is that they assume a high DPI, which is great for print, but makes lilypond scores look sub-par on screen due to aliasing. Time for me to go get one of those fancy high-dpi/'retina' laptops I guess ).

While Rosegarden does the on-screen rendering itself, it uses lilypond for printing. You can put multiple midi segments next to each other on the same track to achieve multiple voices on one staff. It can display both segments 'mixed together' in the notation editor, but unfortunately, in my experience, manipulating the score when showing multiple segments in the notation editor is clumsy/buggy. Opening 2 notation editor windows (one for each segment/voice) is a workaround.

When printing, Rosegarden does fairly nicely produce the lilypond code I'd expect: one staff with 2 voices, each segment corresponding to a voice. Unfortunately the PDF generated from this lilypond code is actually still really ugly - not sure what's going on there, *hopefully* that could be fixed by tweaking some lilypond settings?

[lasconic]

Hi,

What's wrong with MuseScore regarding piano music? It can handle a grand staff and up to 4 voices per staff.

Here is an example http://musescore.com/marcsabatella/reunion
Here are more examples in different styles http://musescore.com/sheetmusic?part=0&parts=1

[angelsguitar]

Hi,

What's wrong with MuseScore regarding piano music? It can handle a grand staff and up to 4 voices per staff.

Here is an example http://musescore.com/marcsabatella/reunion
Here are more examples in different styles http://musescore.com/sheetmusic?part=0&parts=1

Agree with lasconic. You should check out MuseScore. It can handle piano music very well.