Lilypond.org

[Movies]

Perhaps this has all ready been covered here, but I thought I would let y'all know that I was recently introduced to this free music notation software by a friend and feel like it's really pretty awesome.

I have yet to take the time to fully explore all of the features, but the few things I have done have been super easy/intuitive.

http://www.lilypond.org

[bent6]

Lilypond is very cool from a text-based standpoint. The printed output (typically via a PDF file) is the best I have seen short of using actual physical engraving techniques. Of course, it's an offline process. I understand there are methods for converting MIDI files to LY files, but I haven't had the opportunity to try that yet.

What it has done, is allow me to quickly transcribe parts without having to worry about getting the graphic formatting right. It just is! The text entry is fast once you get the hang of it.

The only real issue I've run into is getting older LY files to print with newer versions. Apparently header formatting changes with each version and sometimes creates small incompatibilities.

I don't know that I'll ever use it lots, but it certainly does produce beautiful looking output!

Ken

[dewdman42]

Lily does indeed produce some gorgeous output. The main thing about the output is that it does NOT look like Finale, Sibelius or all the other notationals. There is something about it that looks way more "typeset". I find the typical Finale stuff to be sterile to look at in comparison. If you produce a score with it, people will be asking you what you used to create the music.

That being said, its definitely not the most user friendly setup. You have to enter a mark up language into a text file and that produces the output by running through some convuluted, perhaps over engineered Python code. if you spend a lot of time, you may get good at it. I found it laborious the couple times I tried it and admittedly I didn't take the time to really learn it. The real Lilypond gurus often have to doink around with learning a little python in order to handle extreme custom situations, from what I understand.

Its an open source project, and as such you have to deal with bugs, with uppity developers who would often rather argue with you or act offended by any criticisms or comments you may have. Their standard response seems to be something along the lines of "If you don't like the way it works, then you are welcome to contribute some source code to make it better". Oh and if you aren't running Linux they don't want to be bothered by you either. LOL.

All that being said, I still intend to produce some of my own work using Lilypond because it really is gorgeous, I just haven't gotten around to doing it yet. The reality I realized is that Finale output is good enough for most people, so why bother. For someone on a budget, Lily is free, can't complain about that!

The MIDI to ly converter is really not all that useful for the most part. That will get the basic note data in there, but you're going to have to wade around in the markup language in order to turn it into a real score. There is also some MusicXML to ly converters and it seems like I played around with trying to convert Finale scores into Lily scores that way and got some limited success with it. At one point I was thinking about writing a Finale plugin that would produce ly code, but who has time.

If DP output MusicXMl from its own scores, it would be really awesome because then we could print out our scores using things like Finale and yes...possibly Lilypond.