an online database of the entire corpus of Gregorian chant in these compact gabc, TeX or XML files

FINALLY someone who understands how incredibly useful that would be! If the Pontifical Institute for Sacred Music has the budget, surely it should jump on this idea immediately.

Actually I've been finding that scanning and Photoshop work pretty well for clean chant programs too. Does anyone know if there is a good chant font for Finale?

moconnor

Lilypond is a good program (works on Windows, Linux, Mac) for round-notes, and they have a square note feature but I haven't had the time to work with it yet and I hear that it is a bit buggy. It does not use a graphic interface; you have to program everything with a text editor and then run it through the command line for PDF and/or graphic output. But honestly you can't beat the price for these programs as compared with Finale, and once you get used to the programming aspect -- which isn't too difficult if you patiently trudge through it -- I think you will find that the program is easier and more efficient that Finale.

The Gregoire program that someone spoke about (the French gregorian one that is very buggy) is nice and I find it easier to use than the Meinrad font. I could never figure out how to judge the space that I should place between neumes with the Meinrad font in order then to put the text in below it. It's too time intensive. Gregoire makes the text-entry part a lot easier but it also has a tendency to crash (although I seem to recall having figured out what triggers the crash and how to avoid it) and the graphic output that it produces is tedious (as I recall it saves each staff as a separate graphic file and then dumps then into a Word doc, then you have to mess around with the spacing).

Really, though, some Catholic computer/music geeks really need to get on the ball and make a program (perhaps one that supports both command-line and GUI) that handles both round and square notes with ease and efficiency, with both PDF and hi-res graphic output, and good-quality note engraving. It's about time! Hopefully we will not have to wait too much longer.

The only major bug I've found in Gregoire frustrated me for a long time, but I finally found the trigger. Don't put more than one word attached to any neum. In particular, it seems that Gregoire can't handle having two or more spaces in the text - obviously, you need to be able to have one space to separate words.

So in the cases where I need to put multiple words on a neum, I actually put the 2nd and following words on a note which is up off the top of the staff, and when I import that into PowerPoint I remove the note. If you're using paper, you could probably just as easily use White-Out.

Life is much easier now that I know what to avoid. Gregoire has other occasional quirks but they don't crash the program. I'm not sure that the program is under development anymore, it hasn't changed since I got it a few years ago. Maybe it would be worth contacting the author of the program to see if it's possible to take over the source code? Hmmm..... Would somebody who speaks French be willing to act as an intermediary?

In my work on trying to add to the free tools available for chant notation, I have been playing around with making a chant font called Caeciliae. However, it has some serious limitations, many of which have been identified in this thread: fonts require manual typesetting (much more painstaking than I thought at the outset), don't allow for a separation of musical data from the separation of the form (for programmers: no model/view distinction), etc. Caeciliae requires solid OpenType support, which requires expensive apps (a la Adobe InDesign).

The problem I see with a Finale solution is that it still is a proprietary format with a non-free application.

Gregorio is a good start, but lacks the ease of use required by most non-geeks.

Are there other software engineers who have an interest in a project like this? I have started on the initial architecture of an app for full-on Chant notation (auto formatting, vector output, etc.), but it is quite a project to create a custom typesetting engine. Are there others who want to collaborate on something like this?

During the two-week course on Gregorian semiology taught by Fr Columba Kelly OSB at Saint Meinrad Archabbey (this was 1998 or 2000; not sure exactly which), I was able to purchase from him a beta copy of ChantScribe, a program that used the StMeinrad square-notation fonts along with a user interface. One could select a note type and move notes and neumes to a staff, then type a text below by syllable, and the syllables would stay with their neumes. The Laon and St Gall notations were included, if I recall correctly. I haven't heard of any further development of this application, but such a thing would be just the ticket. Anyone know of something similar? I would imagine a challenge with this sort of thing is the limited market (so far), so it's hard to justify lots of money spent on development.

Marek, phatmatt, and others:

According to the developers of Gregorio:

"Lilypond (documentation) is a very good tool, but the part on Gregorian chant is not maintained and very deep modifications are needed to perfectly align notes and text."

So apparently, the Gregorio developers did consider the route suggested by Marek and found it overly cumbersome.

I myself am familiar with Lilypond and think it's a wonderful music typesetting tool that enables presentation to be separated from content - just not for Gregorian chant. (I used to hard-code HTML and CSS, so Lilypond markup isn't a stretch for me by any means.) The shorthand developed by Gregorio to input the chant is superior in my opinion - take a look at the output and input examples to get a feel for it. (Scroll to the bottom of the page - the example is the introit Populus Sion.)

I often need to combine chant with polyphony - that's why i think, lilypond would be the best way. There would be a lot of work in every case. But in my opinion the interface of lilypond has much more pros than cons. Imagine for example writing strophic hymn. You need to write melody only once and just add new text, if you wish... I think also, that adding of neumatic (non square) notation, would by relatively easy once we have quadratic notation working...

I use Lilypond for modern notation and I think it's great. Gregorio looks like the perfect program. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to make it work on my Mac. The developers seem to have assumed that anyone who wants to or is able to use a text based interface to write musical scores must be a sophisticated hacker. In my case, not so.

So I download the binary, opened the readme file and I get this:

gregorio depends on the libxml2, you must have it installed. If you
want to compile from the sources, you must have the header files of
the libxml2 and flex and bison (of course you will need gcc and make
too).

Oh, of course.

I am emailing a friend who works in the computer science field for help.

I have used Lilypond to make square neumes as well as modern notation.
I _am_ a hacker actually ;-) and I know both LaTeX and Scheme (on which
Lilypond's input language is based). I found Lilypond quite usable for
modern notation (polyphony and lyrics). However, I found its processing
of square neumes fragile (if you make a tiny mistake, the whole output is
messed up), and its error messages nonintuitive.

Unfortunately I don't have time to work on the back end of Lilypond, and
I'm also not a professional typesetter. I imagine it's hard to find someone
with both hacking and typesetting skills, hence the paucity of open-source
solutions.

Robert -- it's easier if you first use a package manager like Fink or
DarwinPorts to install the required packages (libxml2 should be sufficient):

fink install libxml2

However, Gregorio 2.2 doesn't seem to compile on my Mac; I suspect
the developer is compiling with a relaxed set of flags, as the errors are
typical for a C++ coder working in C. You may have to fetch out of their
Subversion repository. If I get a chance, I'll try to fix the bugs, as they
are minor.

No offense to GregEdit as a product, but any software with a website as
hideous as theirs doesn't deserve to be on my computer ;-P

Any Sibelius users out there? Know any Gregorian Chant plug-ins for Sibelius?

AOZ

I've noticed Meinrad Font was written in 1995'ish. Do you use it on a newer computer system like window XP
or the newer MacBooks? I'm worried it might not be compatible with say XP, or Mac Tiger or Mac Leopard.

Tx Aristotle. I will probably spend the $50 & avoid all the free download problems.

Tx--will do.

I forgot to mention a freeware chant font "Festa Dies" from Colombia. Attached to this post is a PDF example file with a the creator's e-mail address. (Note that the Spanish-language keyboard is mapped.)

Using Word 2007 with Meinrad fonts (on Vista) seems to introduce vertical alignment problems between text and music. It changes based on magnification, with music magnifying different from text, throwing the whole thing off. Then when you print, the alignment comes out completely differently from what you see. This of course is completely unacceptable.

Does anyone know the workaround?

The last I heard it is very buggy to the point where the payoff is quite low.

my supposition too

Please add whatever you have done as an attachment here.

Andrew,

I've been using gregorio for a while now too. Typesetting chant is a somewhat random hobby of mine -- I think I do it to remind myself there is better Catholic music than what I hear on a typical Sunday. :-) Perhaps we can collaborate. What features do you find missing in gregorio? I found using OpusTeX slightly tedious, so I just convert gabc files to GregorioTeX files (the default conversion), and fine tune in plain TeX/LaTeX.

chonak,

The first time I installed gregorio on an Ubuntu 7.10 laptop, it took half a day-- font problems. So I know how that is. More recently, I've gotten it running on Windows (cygwin), and Mac OS X; I'm surprised the linux install doesn't "just work" yet. I've toyed with the idea of a native Windows port (wider audience?); not sure if the developer has plans for that.

It's true though that documentation is lacking, and I probably would have been more frustrated getting gregorio to work if I wasn't already familiar with TeX and all its idiosyncrasies. And I'm guessing that that knowledge isn't in a lot of potential users' backgrounds. :-) For usage notes, if you know C and don't mind reading source code, gregorio's is fairly well commented. That's how I learned to do most everything that isn't in the Populus Sion example chant. I could type up my notes, but I assume it's all in the draft documentation... I look forward to reading the English, when it's available.

The linux install procedures in the svn repository are centered around building ubuntu packages.

I'm running on "Hardy Heron" ubuntu -- actually kubuntu.

After checking out the code from svn, you can do these:

cd trunk
dpkg-buildpackages -rfakeroot

You'll have to add various packages and kludge some of the debian build-control files to get the packages to build -- contact me .... at yahoo.com for tips -- but when they do build, two *deb files are created in the directory above "trunk", and a sudo dpkg -i *deb command installs them nicely.

In the trunk/examples directory, there are files with examples of how to add a title.

In gregorio's current state, the developers recommend you go through manual steps to format your score:
-- write the gabc file with no formatting specified
-- determine the ideal size for the score
-- define the style of the initial letter and the text typeface by adding some macro calls
-- set line breaks in the gabc file manually.

So far I have not seen the documentation on macros to change typeface, etc. However, there is a macro to adjust the size of the score. (I'll post an example here, though it doesn't use many features of the product.)

TBL,

That is the most incredible thing I have ever seen !!!!

I have been searching for Gregorian music software for so long, and begging Sibelius to make one.

I think Finale has one called "Medieval"

TBL,

I'm using gregorio 0.2.2

I haven't yet succeeded in getting the svn repository version installed.

Is there a package or font that needs to be installed to get the V and R symbols?

Andrew-- the current gregorio svn version (0.9) comes with fonts (3 different chant fonts for the notes, and a symbol font). The symbol font includes multiple crossed V's and R's, crosses, etc. It's quite handy. I guess that's little help if you can't get it working though, sorry :-) Installation for me was an almost painless standard configure/make process...