Thanks Paul 🙂 Make sure to check out Ardour before starting with Pro Tools!

Anyway, what I REALLY wanted to say is – great work on the transcription of Trane’s solo, getting it on paper is one thing , but to actually play it is another. I’m a guitarplayer and are working on one of his longer solos myself atm ( One up, One down – from live at the Halfnote ) it’s 30 minutes long so I do have my work cut out for me 🙂 All the best , and thx for the all info on software I didn’t expect. / Paul

I agree that there is a lot of money in the music business in general; unfortunately only a tiny fraction of that is available for music notation, however my hunch is that there *would* be enough available for a free software notation solution which was on a par with Sibelius in all the areas considered important by most users (WYSIWYG, low learning curve, high quality playback etc.). Part of my reasoning is that it would easily steal not just the Sibelius user base, but the Finale one too.

David, I mostly agree with your assessment of Daniel’s response, although I believe there are flaws in his reasoning which I highlighted in my response – did you see that yet? It was pending moderation until earlier today.

I find Daniel’s response to Adam’s blog post well-reasoned. Obviously the history of his team is catered to a particular style of programming, and the history of Steinberg to a particular style of marketing.

Again, he’ll ultimately not be in control of his creations, like when working for Avid. That’s a high price to pay. And the users of his new software will ultimately not be in control of their creations: if the software stops development at some point of time, nobody will have the right to port it to newer computers, so the music in a proprietary, likely binary format will cease to be usable.

Thanks for the comments Ben. I don’t think you have to worry about monoculture in the F/OSS world – there is such a huge amount of energy going into innovation (not to mention the NIH syndrome) that any time a leader starts to lag, a rival will quickly pop up to whip it back into shape. There are countless examples of this happening over the years.

Regarding rewrites, just because the Mozilla team is engaging in it, it doesn’t prove that it’s a good idea 😉 Time will tell.

If you read Daniel Spreadbury’s response to my blog post, you’ll see that he lists several reasons why they did not start with Free Software; however I have also responded with counter-arguments. In particular, even though they are of course field experts, he admits that they have deliberately not looked at the LilyPond or MuseScore code, therefore they are not currently able to accurately assess whether either would be a viable foundation for their new project.

Hi Han-Wen, thanks for the reply, and even bigger thanks for LilyPond! I noticed your very gracious message on Daniel’s blog, which certainly does a lot to promote a positive image of the LilyPond community. I also see Daniel has already replied to my blog, and I will reply to him now.

I won’t be using or endorsing Steinberg’s new product, but I think the fact that the Sibelius programming team isn’t going into automated-trading, website design or any other sort of mundane IT jobs a win by itself.