I've opened the thread now also in case anyone here might be interested in commenting.

I am starting to use Lilypond, because I want to help a composer of polyphony who is in my choir by engraving his pieces. We are learning to sing one of his works, and find his notations hard to follow. I would enjoy learning how to engrave his work for him, and perhaps teach him how, even though he is a bit of a lovable, curmudgeonly, Luddite.

Thanks to Richard Chonak for his interface for Gregorio and to Jeffrey Ostrowski for his video, I've learned enough to create a simple piece of chant this week.

I'm finding it a lot harder to move onto Lilypond for engraving polyphony. Does anyone know of:

* a similar interface to Lilypond?
* a similar video?

Although I've been reading the Lilypond documentation, I keep wishing I could get an existing .ly for a piece of polyphony rendering in Gregorian style. With a file that already works, I would have all the correct headers and definitions and could reverse engineer it, in a sense. I need to concentrate to begin with specifying the pitches and words. And there's a lot to learn when trying to figure out how to specify multiple voices.

So, if you have an .ly file for as SATB setting in Gregorian notation, I would love it if you would share with me.

Any help, advice, .ly files to serve as templates would be appreciated.

Nancho Alvarez's site (here) has tons of polyphonic scores with their respective Lilypond files. These are all also accessible through CPDL.

There is a GUI front-end for Lilypond, but I have never used it.

I would have to spend $350 (and that's the academic price, down from $600.)
And I would only be able to collaborate with other people who spend $350 or $600. That's a small subset of people. Why let your creative work be held hostage to a software company?

Finale products:
• NotePad – free – scores of up to 8 staves per system, imports MIDI or MusicXML files.
• SongWriter – $50 – adds page layout control, audio mixer, codas and repeats that play back, unlimited lyric verses, additional markings, text editor.
• Print Music – $120 – adds up to 24 staves per system, part extraction, scan input, handbells used chart.
• Finale 2012 – $350 (academic or religious), $600 – just about everything the professional engraver could want.

Most people writing or arranging for choirs without extra requirements for professional publicationh would find NotePad more than adequate. And all the Finale products have intuitive GUI-interface for note entry, in WYSISYG style. The learning curve, starting with NotePad, is a lot less steep than the learning curve for LilyPond (unless, perhaps, you are a computer geek, well versed with something like TeX or LaTeX).

CHGiffen and ArthurConnick. Thanks for the pointers to .ly source files. I didn't see your replies before, since I only drop in here once in a blue moon.

I have some source files from A Connick, and one from Kerry McCarthy, so I'm good to get started, when I get back to it.

All: thanks for the helpful discussion.

http://lilypond.org/