[seul-edu] ISO software evals: Music

["Roy Hakes" <rhakes@erols.com>]

Hi folks,

As a first cut at the music offerings for the ISO (of the seven in the
index), I'd recommend removing KLearnNotes and lnotes from consideration,
mostly because they aren't quite ready to go.  KLearnNotes works ok, but has
no clef signs, so you're not really drilling notes effectively.  lnotes
still has some bugs that make it not quite usable (and I'm not up on gtk
programming enough to fix them, though I tried :)).  It's too bad, those
were about the only things potentially useful for lower school students.

The other five are cool, though I could only see them potentially in pretty
specific (advanced) high-school music teaching settings.  The most
pedagogically oriented are GnuSolfege for ear-training, and DrumPatters
(which is pretty confusing for me) for drummer-oriented training.

The others (denemo, brahms, compo, and Rosegarden [don't know why that's in
multimedia and not music]) are cool tools for writing and playing music, and
would certainly be worth having in the computer lab that music students were
playing with, since you certainly need some kind of software that will let
you notate (and print) as well as hear your arrangements.  There are
dependencies on almost all of them that would need to be included, but I
guess that's for a later time.

Will do multimedia in a couple of days.

Roy