Down the Rabbit Hole: Addendum

So, after some encouragement from Dave, I revisited Gregorio. After messing around a bit more, I discovered the reason it hadn't properly loaded and connected itself with TeX Live was that, when the installer was finished, I checked the "display readme.txt" option, which was causing the error message about not finding the TeX Live files (???). When I unchecked that option before completing the install, it appeared to connect up properly and I was able to get Gregorio and TeX Live to compile.

The process is a little tricky, but so, so, so much faster than my other option, which was to use the now-"free" copy of Adobe InDesign CS2 with the font Caeciliae. While that method produced very pretty scores,  it took an ungodly amount of time. Using Gregorio, I was able to produce sharp-looking scores in about 15 minutes.

Check them out:

Down the Rabbit Hole

Being of unsound mind, I decided to investigate that dark and frightening world known as Gregorian Chant notation software. Consider this your official warning: that way lies madness.

So far as I could determine, there are six options:

1. Chanter
2. Gregoire
3. GregEdit
4. Caeciliae
5. Gregorio
6. Build a time machine, go back to the sixth century, teach Pope Gregory the Great modern music notation, then come back to the present and use MuseScore, because Gregorian notation will never have existed.

So far as I can determine, option 6 is the simplest and least frustrating method.

What brought this on was a desire to be able to make fresh copies of the chant I use in choir. Sometimes, a chant will be photocopied to illegibility. Sometimes, I swear that we're using the original copies written by Brother McShakyhands of the Order of Blind Friars as he was dying of bubonic plague in the 13th century. Either way, sometimes it's nice to be able to fix up a score.

As our test case, I'll see which software can best duplicate the Alleluia Tone VIII that I've been using: