Yay legacy support!

[pne]

I just wanted to install Personal Composer 16, an old program for typesetting music (old as in "written for Windows 3.1" old), so that I could input a song I'm supposed to be practising the accompaniment for (I think I mentioned it in my journal—Kathrin and Patrizia will be singing).

Unfortunately, it comes on 2 3½" disks… and our new computer doesn't have a FDD.

My options are roughly (in no particular order):

• Install the FDD from my old computer (there is a slot on the front that one could break out, and presumably a cage behind it where one would fit)
• Buy an external USB FDD
• Copy the diskettes to a CD-R at work

Darn.

OTOH, maybe I should take this as a cue to learn LilyPond, which I think I have around here as part of my Cygwin installation.

Edit: Actually, LilyPond won't help me that much; I just remembered that my primary goal was to have the program play the music for me so I would hear how it sounds when played at the right tempo rather than my irregular hunt-and-peck tempo, whereas LilyPond is all about creating sheet music. Hm.

Edit: Oooh. Perhaps all is not lost.

Edit: Success! The sheet music looks rather crappy, mostly due to stems pointing in the wrong direction, but the MIDI file it produced sounds passable, if rather mechanical.

Comments

[robnorth.livejournal.com]

Kewl. Thanks for the link to LilyPond. I'm gonna download it and see how it works, along with LilyComp and midi2ly.

I have a copy of Dr. T's Copyist that dates back to 1989 and the old Yamaha C1 I used to have. It doesn't like Windows, period...it's strictly DOS.

And now that I'm in a band (http://www.moustacheverticale.com), I want to print lead sheets for the songs we're doing. This should do the trick great. I hope.