Hi everyone, Wondering what software everyone uses to write gregorian chant? I am current using Sibelius 7 and unfortunately It seems there is no way to write chant on it. Wondering if there is a program that can facilitate this? I saw a post where they mention Illuminare Score Editor, but from reading the post it says it might be down and its an online thing.
I always use gregorio for any project. Not only does it almost automatically create correct chant scores (without needing to worry about following many of the various conventions), but for someone (like me) who is coding oriented, it's by far the quickest way too.
In addition to that, the code can be shared very easily and used, making it very open source friendly. I wouldn't do it any other way,
thelonius- The link I posted is to the Gregorio home page, not an exe file. Gregorio is a bit of a burden to spin up on your machine, so the two web based tools chonak mentioned are your best bet until you're ready to turn hardcore geek and get your own install of TeX up and running on your own machine.
I used Gregoire, but it's a very old program at this point - probably 8 or 9 years. And I haven't been writing much in the last couple of years. The other options have improved a lot.
I only need small snippets for leaflets and programs so using Illuminare Score Editor is perfect for what I need. For modern notation or chant notation you can load the Saint Meinrad fonts onto your computer and simply type them in using your favorite document editor.
@March Cerisier: I'm actually starting to use InDesign, is the Caecelia font free? Do you import of a staff or how do you write your music on InDesign?
@donr: THANKS! that is pretty much straight-forward font
There's a great PDF at the above site explaining the font. It's much easier to use than the st meinrad fonts, though I do use their melody font in indesign also. The beauty of caeciliae is that the pitch and type of nueme are entered separately, instead of every possibly having to be a character in the font. For example, you'd enter '3p' for a punctum at line 3. Multi element nuemes are super easy also. I highly recommend trying it. It is free.
I started with InDesign + Caeciliae. After setting chant pieces that spanned several pages though, I found that I was spending more time correcting layout and pagination than I was on the chant itself. So I wrote my own layout program...my screen looks like the attached screenshot when setting chant: 1) write the chant in a gabc-like format; 2) run it through the layout engine; 3) place the generated images/PDFs in InDesign for publishing.
The major reason I didn't go with gregorio was mostly personal...I don't enjoy working with TeX, I wanted more control over the layout than I had with gregorio, and I just wanted to tackle the problem of chant layout for the fun of it. When gregorio started using the Caeciliae glyphs back in 2008, I nearly just went with it. In the end though, I needed some other features than I couldn't accomplish with gregorio, so I'm still using a custom solution for now...
Gregorio for chant, Finale for the rest. Lilypond is okay, but not as flexible for formatting as Finale is for my purposes - which may be influenced by my long time use of and corresponding familiarity with Finale.
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