21 Feb
2005
21 Feb
'05
4:20 p.m.
Noah Roberts wrote:
Have you had a look at lilypond or ABC? These are
music languages,
typesetting really in the case of lilypond at least, that can be
translated into many formats including midi. I only managed to work
with lilypond and it seems pretty complete.
--- ---
LilyPond is a very well-designed and developed program for music
notation and engraving (producing sheet music).
Rather than using a WYSIWYG visual-oriented editor like other music
notation programs such as Finale, Sibelius and Igor, LilyPond allows a
musician, music notator or composer to create an entire score, from
simple single-staff melody-chord-and-lyrics "lead sheet" to piano music
to full orchestral score, using just a standard text editor.
LilyPond then parses (interprets) the plain-text document one has
created, and outputs a beautifully engraved score in PostScript and PDF
among other formats. LilyPond can also create a standard MIDI file
from the same plain-text source file.
It is a truly amazing program that, like a lot of Linux music and audio
programs, has been developed with a lot of care and dedication and a
great sense of generosity to the Linux community on the part of the
developers: LilyPond is free. The developers, like many other great
programmers that work for the Linux community, do appreciate financial
support for the project if or to the extent one can afford it, but they
don't demand it.
I used to use the expensive commercial program Finale, and in my opinion
LilyPond beats Finale easily in concept, design, implementation and the
visual appearance of the final score. Although LilyPond is especially
created for those who use a Linux or *BSD operating system, it will also
run on Windows computers under the Cywin environment.
To investigate LilyPond further, go to LilyPond's homepage:
http://www.lilypond.org/
Best wishes,
-Steve D, New Mexico, US, UTC -7