As an untrained but interested bystander/hobbyist, the scores engraved by Lilypond are orders of magnitude better than those produced by the mainstream WYSIWYG editors, in the same "I deeply care about typography" sort of way that you get from documents produced with TeX but not Word or Google Docs.<p>My ex-wife is a musician and a music teacher, and (especially for her teaching job) ends up writing a fair bit of sheet music. She used one of the point-and-click scorewriters for a while (Sibelius maybe?) and was thorough displeased with both the output quality and the editing process itself. After some poking and prodding, and getting her to overcome the "but it's writing code!" barrier, she fell in love with how productive it is and still uses it, some 15 years later. It was pretty interesting to see somebody with no exposure to the software world develop their own habits and code style.
If creating your scores in vimacs and then typing "make" isn't your cup of tea, there's Frescobaldi, essentially an IDE for Lilypond.<p><a href="https://frescobaldi.org/" rel="nofollow">https://frescobaldi.org/</a>
I'm happy to be reminded that Lilypond is still around. I used it to produce scores (and MIDIs) 15+ years ago, because it offered the same experience as LaTeX -- beautiful results if you're willing to code and, occasionally, battle eldritch horrors beneath its surface. Like (La)TeX and Emacs, I hope it becomes one of those rare pieces of software that lasts longer than a human lifetime. Few things we build these days, not just software, endure so long.
I was pleasantly surprised when I first saw this. I always thought that lilypond was a WYSWYG for music sheets but it turned out that it's more a LaTex for music sheets which is what I prefer for typesetting text.
I love lilypond. My son plays the piano now and I make simplified arrangements of songs for him. He can pick out songs by ear and I'm teaching him to hand annotate first, because I don't know a better way to encourage familiarity with the notation, but I'll get him set up with lilypond eventually.<p>There are various nicer IDEs for it, but I just run side-by-side windows with zathura and emacs; zathura will automatically reload when PDFs change on disk so I can see my changes immediately.
Lilypond is freaking awesome. As a hobbyist with a music degree but unrelated career, I switched a while back, and it's saved me multiple times over just because of backwards compatibility and free software. My old version of Sibelius doesn't run on newer hardware, so some old scores I never ported are lost if I don't spend money just to export. But my old lilypond scores will always be fine.
I'm greatly thankful for the hard work put into lilypond and frescobaldi.<p>I use lilypond to type up leadsheets for jazz and some other genres [0], inspired by Mark Veltzer's Openbook [1]. I've gotten pretty fast at typing up songs over time. The goal is to have a CLI or web interface to generate a pdf for concert/bb/bass clef/etc, optionally include lyrics/QR codes, and so on.<p>Being able to transpose is quite handy, although I'm working on a system to automatically handle larger transpositions (e.g. for Eb instruments or for bass clef). The problem is if I statically pick one direction (up or down), some leadsheets will have the notes too high or low. I think I can resolve it with having all songs entered in absolute pitches and scanning for the lowest/highest note.<p>0: <a href="https://github.com/andrewzah/openbook-dev" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/andrewzah/openbook-dev</a><p>1: <a href="https://github.com/veltzer/openbook" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/veltzer/openbook</a>
Lilypond also has a guile API, and if you are not interested in the actual notation generation or at least how it looks, it can make some pretty weird and cool midi files. You can turn it into a kind of makeshift lisp Supercollider pattern generator.
One of my family members is a music theory professor, here's what they had to say about this:<p>> [Lilypond] was one of a handful of early programs turning notation into ASCII text. Older program but still useful. MusicXML has made a lot of these older systems less productive these days, though: <a href="https://www.musicxml.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.musicxml.com/</a><p>> Developed by Michael Goode at Stanford – it's now the international standard for music encoding.
Interesting. Looks very similar to CSound score notation, with CSound being oriented towards rendering audio files, rather than printable documents. CSound is also FOSS, and has a sound generation side that is incredibly deep and detailed.<p><a href="https://csound.com/" rel="nofollow">https://csound.com/</a>
I've been using Lilypond for a number of years now and it's a truly remarkable piece of software. The quality of the engraving is extremely high, the amount of customization you can carry out is unrivalled, and it is also incredibly versatile. Out of the box it supports stuff ranging from Guitar and lute tablature[1] and notation specific to percussion[2] to modern chord names[3] and Baroque figured bass [4]. Did you know you can also use it to typeset neumes for Gregorian chant[5] and mensural notation[6]?<p>Nevertheless I should mention that Lilypond serves a different purpose and is aimed at a different audience when compared to popular scorewriters such as musescore. It is primarily an engraver and should be used to typeset existing music, composing directly into it is always going to be very awkward compared to WYSIWYG editors or even just manuscript paper. The learning curve is also quite large and you must be ready to constantly refer back to its (very well written) documentation. But like any complex tool, acquiring familiarity with it is very rewarding in the long run.<p>[1] <a href="http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-notation-for-fretted-strings" rel="nofollow">http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-notation-for-percussion" rel="nofollow">http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/common-...</a><p>[3] <a href="http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/displaying-chords" rel="nofollow">http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/display...</a><p>[4] <a href="http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/figured-bass" rel="nofollow">http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/figured...</a><p>[5] <a href="http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typesetting-gregorian-chant" rel="nofollow">http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typeset...</a><p>[6] <a href="http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typesetting-mensural-music" rel="nofollow">http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.22/Documentation/notation/typeset...</a>
Lilypond helped me learn a lot of music theory I had missed in my learning to play piano; I use it to transcribe music now and it’s a fantastic piece of software (with fantastic docs!)