Note: gcomposer is more or less sleeping.
I don't think it's the program I need to make music. I need
to think a lot. Don't expect new versions soon.
gcomposer is a little tool to write music.
The target audience is classical guitarists who want to create their own (preferably free) music.
The key point in making gcomposer was to
have some quick audio feedback to ease the life of the
composer. Sure, one can play the piece she writes using
her guitar but having both the guitar and a computer in
use at the same time was thought to be a bit difficult.
And since the code to have audio feedback was easy to do,
well, it's done.
Some might argue that a computer's program is not
required to write music. That's true. But some people
might have trouble with paper and pencil. In particular
one might want a nice undo/redo mechanism to test various
ideas as quick as possible. This is the second important
concept of gcomposer.
Why gcomposer when so many good software
already exist, are much better and have more features?
Well, first reason: I wanted to code it. Second reason:
I wanted a small, fast and reliable program with a GUI. Other
software are big and slow (at least on my pentium 200 MHz, 64 MB
of RAM, much less that 200 MB of free hard-disk space) so
I just made a very simple one with just what I need. I release
it for some other people might find it useful (why not?).
gcomposer works under GNU/Linux and certainly
other systems too (it is known to work under Microsoft's Windows,
a more or less working binary is provided below).
It is released in the public domain (freedom has no license).
The list may grow in the future:
May, 18th, 2009:
gcomposer-0.9.4pre3.tar.gz.
Same as pre2, only the website has changed.
March, 31st, 2008:
gcomposer 0.9.4pre2 (not available, get pre3 instead).
This is the first release at Savannah.
One may want to take a look at the Changelog to know what's new, what bugs were removed, and so on.
If you want to hack into gcomposer you will
need gtkcooker,
a powerful abstract GUI language used to describe the GUI
of gcomposer.
There is gcomposer-intaller.exe that more or less works under Windows.
I am currently rewriting gcomposer in a new,
more abstract, language (that has to be designed as well).
Don't expect any new release before, well, a while.
To install gcomposer, after downloading
and unpacking the archive, just do a 'make' and you
then should have a file 'gcomposer' that you can
put where you want (like /usr/bin for example).
In case of trouble, contact the authors.
The first thing to do is to launch the tutorial.
gcomposer is very keyboard-centric so
you probably cannot avoid running the tutorial to
use it to its full potential.
I think that around one hour is required to run the tutorial.
In case of troubles, don't hesitate to contact the authors.
The most well known and powerful free software to write and engrave music using a computer is lilypond. It is powerful and rich-featured. But it is very big and has no GUI.
The last problem was solved by the creators of denemo (was it the first GUI frontend to lilypond?).
Later in time (I think) we find NoteEdit. It is well known in the GNU/Linux music community. I don't know if it is still actively developed or not.
After NoteEdit, its original creator is now working at NtEd (writing this 2008-03-31). It seems to be also rich-featured and nice.
Other people prefered to keep working on NoteEdit and so they made canorus because they found NoteEdit not to be well designed (in term of internal code) so they started all over from scratch.
There are other projects, like MuseScore or Rosegarden. They are both very rich-featured and nice.
My main concerns with these projects are: lack of GUI for lilypond, and: big, slow, buggy for most of them (don't take me wrong, I don't claim these are bad programs; my biggest problem is that I have a slow computer so the "buggy" problem is not the main one; the "big" and "slow" are; remember I own a Pentium 200MHz ordered around 1997; "rich-featured" often means "eats lots of CPU and RAM").
Classic guitarists have also special needs like
fingering which are not well handled as far as my tests
can tell (but it's true that I didn't give a look at lilypond
for a long time; hopefully it is better now). gcomposer
(as of 2008-03-31) does not provide fingering. It may change in
the future. (But the goal of gcomposer is to
provide a tool to create music, not pretty print it;
but I agree, fingering may be part of the music) (even if sometimes
various people disagree on the fingering) (but at least the tool
should allow the composer to provide her own fingering) (anyway,
time will tell.)
Contact: sed@free.fr
Created:
Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:07:50 +0200
Last update:
Mon, 18 May 2009 15:35:06 +0200
