I haven't been able to try anything else, though I've been looking around and have become interested in three other packages:jeffrey wrote:I'd be interested in hearing how easy/difficult it is to write music with this interface. Is it next to useless, as good as anything else out there, or really fast and efficient?
"Rosegarden" http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
"NoteEdit" http://abcplus.sourceforge.net/#noteedit
"ABC Plus" http://abcplus.sourceforge.net/
The problem with the first two is that they seem to require KDE, and I have a feeling that that would be a big load on my minnow of a system. I believe both of these can also use Timidity if you want them to.
"ABC Plus" may be an interesting alternative, but I haven't had time to look into it further as yet. It seems to provide a similarly fast textual means of entering music as PMW. ABC Plus builds upon the facilities offered by ABC ( http://www.walshaw.plus.com/abc/ ). I like your interface to the PMW/Timidity combination; being written with bash and Xdialog it's relatively easy to modify. However, it would be nice to have a package that was inherently more interactive with both the music score and the textual representation, which is no criticism of your work; there is a limit to what you can do with the underlying packages. Timidity itself puts quite a heavy load on my system actually (seems to occupy a fair amount of memory). That said, the program works well and is very useful indeed.
Here is some blurb about ABC Plus, though you may well know about the package already:
ABC plus website wrote:I find that the ABC music notation language is a wonderful tool to typeset sheet music. ABC is one of the best designed, easy to use, well-thought out, and nicely implemented notation formats I've ever seen: IMHO, it surpasses other good notation languages like GNU Lilypond or MusiXTeX. (Philip's Music Writer is a serious contender though.) You can write music in a very simple ASCII format and convert it to MIDI, or typeset it to make professional-looking scores. . . . The only serious problem with ABC is that it was originally designed for melody, not for harmony. In simple words, this means that you can only write music for a single instrument or voice. . . . Some ABC applications implement unofficial extensions to the ABC language that make it possible to write polyphonic music. Low-level details (formatting and MIDI effects) are supported too. The purpose of the ABC Plus project is to provide software and documentation for this extended ABC.