Denemo: it gets better.

Denemo is a lot better than i remember it.

i sing in choir. since i'm a terrible pianist, i cannot really sit in front of a piano and play my line of a song easily. this isn't a big problem for some of the music we sing, either because there's an easily accessible rehearsal track, or because we rehearse as a group frequently enough that i pick it up at practice. however, if it's difficult but not particularly well known, i'm in a position to have to make my own rehearsal track.

Denemo is score editing software for Linux...basically, a front end for Lilypond, a GNU music score engraver. it's useful for writing down compositions, but also invaluable if you need to learn a vocal line. it is supposed to allow you to type in a line with associated directions, and then play it back. you can follow along with the score; it plays what you've typed in accurately, unlike my inept piano fingers.

i remember using it about two years ago to make some rehearsal scores, but it was a clunky mess. the keyboard shortcuts weren't particularly intuitive, the menus were a mess, and i had a terrible time getting any of the graphical windows or mouse shortcuts to work. it was an unpleasant experience...i slogged through because i needed to have something reliable from which to rehearse some solos i was trying out for, but i cursed that program left and right. it was so bad that i went back to taking pieces to the rehearsal pianos at the library and blundering through them there. that's BAD.

tonight, i finally revisited it. i needed something in order to make some rehearsal materials for pieces i'm singing this season, and there was no way i was ever going to be able to stumble through playing all my parts. i wanted to give it one more try, since it had been so long. i was excited to see that it worked significantly better than before. the default keyboard shortcuts were easier to type: numbers for notes, and alt-numbers for the corresponding rests. the menus and mouse shortcuts actually work...i'm not tearing my hair out anymore about how to enter a time signature, key change, a fermata, a repeat sign, or anything else! and, if i want to make keyboard shortcuts that make sense to me for any or all of the edits i commonly make to a score, i can.

it isn't perfect. it took me several tries to get triplets to work correctly; this annoyed me greatly, as there were two pieces i was entering in which my line had a ton of triplets. furthermore, even though counting up from 0 instead of from 1 is correct (and the geekier way to do it), it's annoying to have the keyboard shortcut for a whole note (0) on the right side of my keyboard, and then start at 1, 2, 3 for half note, eighth note, sixteenth note, etc. however, i think that can be rectified by changing my keyboard shortcuts around, something i may do if i end up using this program with some frequency.

finally, i'm even more excited because once i did the work of typing in my line from each of my scores, it was so easy to turn each rehearsal score into an mp3 that i can toss on my iPod and listen to when i'm running around town. i just saved the Denemo file as a MIDI file (from right inside Denemo). since i had timidity (a MIDI player, which will also play MIDI files as .wav files) and LAME (an .mp3 encoder) installed on my machine, i just ran the following two commands on the MIDI file:

$ timidity -Ow file.mid -o file.wav
$ lame file.wav

and, there it was. an .mp3 of a piano playing my line in the song, far better than i would ever be able to play it.