Technology In Use | vonMenchhofen Urtext Music Editions

We are old world - but still love Technology!

Technology We Use

While we are at heart old world, we still have a deep love of technology tools. Why are we listing all this? We beleive in open-source. Open-source is all about freedom. A tool that is proprietary gives a small group control of a huge resource. To simplify: imagine a hammer that you'd have to license to replication or use. Nothing would ever get done. If everyone could make a hammer than building could move more quickly. If everyone had a right to modify the hammer, the tool would get better and better. Do we think that you will replicate our business - maybe - but then we need grow and become better to keep your business.

Here's a list of the technology tools that we use:

Operating System: Linux / Fedora / i3 Desktop

vonMenchhofen Urtext believes in the FOSS/OSS (Free Open-Source/Open Source) world. By sharing knowlegdge freely, everyone benefits. It also means that we have to stay at the top of our "game" to stay competetive. With open source, one must strive to offer a terrific service AND a terrific product. To that end, we use only open-source software and operating systems to run our computers (both hosting and development).

Linux runs the computers at vonMenchhofen Urtext. Linux is an operating system (like Windows or MacOS) that care of all of the operations on a PC. While Linux refers to a type of operating system, Linux comes in many, many flavors by many different companies. The flavor of Linux that we use is Fedora (If you are interested in linux there are other flavors that are both easier and harder to use from Ubuntu to Arch).

If you are a Linux user, you might also be interested to know that vonMenchhofen Urtext uses a window tiling manager called i3. i3 is a great system that puts the emphasis on keyboard interaction over the mouse. This makes programming and using the computer much quicker.

Servers: LAMP at DigitalOcean

vonMenchhofen Urtext hosts its highly custom web application on servers hosted at DigitalOcean. We use a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack to run the web application with which you are presently interacting.

Database: Bespoke Design in MySQL

The database structure is held in a MariaDB (MySQL) database on our servers at DigitalOcean. All the database servers are backed up at the end of each business day and a master backup is written "off-site" at the end of each week.

Editors: Straight VIM to PDF

Distraction is a killer of productivity. Beautiful music simplifies a view and removes distractions. A programming integrated development environment (IDE) should do the same. Therefore, we use a customized version of VIM with NerdTree, TagBar and Airline installed with pathogen (we only mention this for those really interested in replicating our environments).

Compiler: Lilypond 2.19.82 & pdfTeX 3.14

This is the star of the show: Lilypond is what makes the product we are selling. It is a compiler for music notation written in straight text. Again, open-source and customizable!

Printers

For hard copies scores you may order, we have several different printers that we use - including the ability to print score booklets on ledger sized paper.