

Open source typesetter for sheet music - sublemonic
http://lilypond.org/

======
djcapelis
I think this was one of the better writeups about Lilypond's commitment to
good music typography I've read: <http://lilypond.org/about/automated-
engraving/big-page>

That essay is a very nice rundown on the types of problems lilypond has dealt
with in terms of working out how to create beautiful sheet music.

~~~
nandemo
Yes, it's a very instructive essay.

However, notice that they only claim that Lilypond's default output tends to
be better than other software's. It's not always as good as a good manual
engraving. You have to tweak it to get it right.

Just today I printed this Tchaikovsky piece. Compare the manual engraving with
a Lilypond output here (1st and 3rd links):

[http://imslp.org/wiki/Dumka,_Op.59_(Tchaikovsky,_Pyotr_Ilyic...](http://imslp.org/wiki/Dumka,_Op.59_\(Tchaikovsky,_Pyotr_Ilyich\))

In particular, look at the the _Poco meno mosso_ section at pages 6 and 5,
respectively. While the original has 2 bars in one line, the Lilypond version
has 3. Not only the notes look too small, but the 8va in the second bar is
almost unreadable.

But, alas, I cannot play it anyway.

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dangrover
Lilypond is neat. I'm using its output (and a buncha tools I built around it)
in my iPhone app launching Tuesday: <http://wonderwarp.com/etude>

~~~
jacobolus
Wow, that's really neat. Do you have to hand typeset everything in its
library, or are you mining some online set of lilypond files, or what?

~~~
dangrover
I've mined Mutopia for the majority of music, but there are maybe 30 songs
I've done by hand just because they were obvious holes in the selection. I'm a
little unsure about offering CC-licensed stuff in the app, but my Etude-
converted songs are also offered under CC and I'm going to be linking to the
licenses, so I think it should be fine.

I'm going to try to write a post to show HN about the tech behind it. I wrote
my own .ly parser/preprocessor in Python as part of the song conversion. To
help the forked version of Lilypond correlate the screen position and time
offset of notes in the piece, I ended up having it do things like unroll
macros and loops and do all the layout changes I needed to make em work in the
app.

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CoreDumpling
As a nice bonus, Lilypond is also usable via a graphical interface, Denemo
[1]. I've never used Sibelius or Finale so I can't comment on how they
compare.

What I really wish were available, however, is the IMSLP catalog [2] in
digital form (not PDF scans). Is there an app out there to OCR sheet music?

[1] <http://www.denemo.org/index.php/Main_Page>

[2] <http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page>

~~~
nandemo
Mutopia's got what you want:

<http://www.mutopiaproject.org/>

Of course the catalog is only a fraction of IMSLP's (typesetting is much
harder than scanning).

------
elblanco
Lilypond is the music equivalent of TeX. The thought put into how the final
result looks is amazing.

~~~
lamby
Out of interest, have you seen MusiXTeX?

~~~
elblanco
It's been a long time, but yeah. I just checked it out again. To my eye, the
output does not look nearly as good -- it's basically on par with the music
authoring software I was trying to use in the late 90s...which is not really
that great. Sure it gets notes on a page, but is it readable?

To be fair, TeX is not really intended for musical notation, so it's cool they
managed to get that kind of output. But Lilypond is really designed to produce
beautiful, readable scores.

I remember, in a previous life as a violinist, that certain scores were just
really hard to read, or not beautiful, it really killed my motivation to play
them. Even familiar favorites, if engraved poorly were just no fun to read off
of inferior pages.

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gjm11
Lilypond is nice, but its input language is (very powerful but) a bit clumsy
and verbose. Others who feel the same way might want to take a look at PMW
(<http://www.quercite.com/pmw.html>) which also produces high-quality
PostScript output and has a more friendly syntax. Its author, Philip Hazel, is
better known for the Exim mail transfer agent and the PCRE regexp library.

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Luyt
A program with such visual output could really benefit from a gallery page on
its website. I found some examples of which it is capable of on
<http://lilypond.org/switch/tour>

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jazzychad
Yeah, lilypond is awesome. I actually used it to typeset a piece of music that
got published as an arrangement for handbells!
<http://www.beckenhorstpress.com/title.asp?id=HB317>

[edit] link to recording: <http://www.beckenhorstpress.com/audio/HB317.mp3>

Bonus points if you can name the actual piece (the publisher didn't want me to
use the actual title for the published arrangement).

~~~
jaxc
The music is Enigma Variations: Nimrod by Edward Elgar. The Oscillation on the
bells and mp3 compression made it a bit hard at first : )

~~~
jazzychad
Yep, you got it!

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wingo
And tweakable via Scheme to boot!

[http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/In...](http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/Interfaces-
for-programmers#Interfaces-for-programmers)

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aaronblohowiak
boo, gpl. lgpl would be fine

~~~
djcapelis
Apparently the developers felt that the LGPL _wouldn't_ be fine, given that
they GPL'd it.

~~~
devinj
Actually, most likely they thought it would have been fine. Just not _as_
fine.

