How about both? I've taken the time to figure out how to configure NW for those rare occasions when we don't have an organist or pianist available, and the instruments at both churches which I serve as pastor have MIDI-capabilities. With the digital organ we have, it's MIDI channel 1 for upper manual, 2, for lower, and 4 for pedals. Good fun.
Likewise, NWC + Lilypond rocks. But if your friend wants 'simplicity' to his complexity, what he's gone to is probably that. My brother uses Finale, I use NWC; we both get where we need to go.
In case anyone is watching this thread, Phil and I have determined that the problem seems to be his convertor doesn't quite work rightly with 2.5.x files (but again, if you have a passing knowledge of LilyPond, it still works well enough that you can cobble the final work together from the parts).
I was able to take the component files (created by your excellent utility) and assemble them to a working file, which, with a little tweaking (and a grasp of how Lilypond works) made it all work. I really like Lilypond, I just like using NWC as a frontend for it to do the brunt of the arranging and note-entry (I was tweaking a choir piece for our church to take out a key change which made the last part unsingable for our sopranos, who simply can't hit A's anymore).
The later versions I use for my own benefit implement a fair number of Lilypond features that Noteworthy doesn't. If you have specific requirements, please let me know.
I've just loaded your utilities into my Win7 Pro laptop and I'm consistently getting 0 staves with 4 voices as the result from my input file; it's creating all the separate parts, but the main ly file doesn't seem to be grabbing them and linking them? odd.
Thanks for this wonderful tool! It's come to be quite useful. Just a curiosity about how it works.
I have files "466tuba.nwc" and "457tuba.nwc" and it creates separate 466tuba.ly and 475tuba.ly but the staff.ly overwrites. Do I need to manually tweak the staff file name each time if I want to keep multiple source files in the same folder?
Thanks again though... you've saved me hours of labour. I love how NWC works for ease of entry, but I much prefer how Lilypond sets up output.