Eric and I have been working steadily on preparing the sheet music for the book. I am entering it in Finale on the MAC G4 Powerbook that I sold to the studio I work at. I had designed the studio with the Mac integrated, so I realized I had to get another notebook for this tour. I may still have to get a Macbook Pro, but so far I am able to have access to the studio and work on the score.
The new notebook with Vista installed, will soon dual-boot with Ubuntustudio distro, but so far I have not found a good open-source notation program. I really like this notebook that I am updating this post with, but I have no Vista software, everything I have is XP or Windows 2000. I prefer Ubuntu as I can download available software at no charge and so I don’t have to re-purchase or buy updates for software that I already own. The Ubuntustudio distro is supposed to be loaded with software that I had to hunt down in the Gutsy distro that I have installed on my desktop. However, besides Lilypond, which I did try, but could not really figure out, there isn’t a really good notation software that I have found.
I wanted to put a screenshot of the music notation on this page. Ubuntu (so far) is not doing screenshots. Vista does screenshots, but I have no photo editing software to make a .jpg to upload into WordPress. My XP computer has no internet access (planned ultimate firewall – no ethernet cable and no wifi card) because it is my music production computer, so I can’t download the file and upload the result. Off to the studio to try it on the Mac … I remember downloading some open source freeware photo software a while ago. Transitional times in cyberspace — but I hope that once I get the notebook set up and all the tools I need in Ubuntu then I will be able to concentrate on the project and not the enabling technology.
