4 ms·

Open source typesetter for sheet music

49 points by sublemonic 17y ago

aaronblohowiak 17y ago
boo, gpl. lgpl would be fine
- djcapelis 17y ago
  Apparently the developers felt that the LGPL wouldn't be fine, given that they GPL'd it.
  - devinj 17y ago
    Actually, most likely they thought it would have been fine. Just not as fine.
- daeken 17y ago
  While I personally believe the GPL to be a poor license (in fact, I don't consider it to be pro-freedom in the least), criticizing others' license choices is just obnoxious. If you dislike it, don't use the software. If you really don't like it, compete with them.
jazzychad 17y ago
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 http://www.beckenhorstpress.com/title.asp?id=HB317 [edit] link to recording: http://www.beckenhorstpress.com/audio/HB317.mp3 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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    Yep, you got it!
CoreDumpling 17y ago
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 http://www.denemo.org/index.php/Main_Page [2] http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page
- klipt 17y ago
  MuseScore can also export to LilyPond.
- elblanco 17y ago
  Oh great find for the sheet music archive! I'll now be drowning is music thanks!
- nandemo 17y ago
  Mutopia's got what you want: http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ Of course the catalog is only a fraction of IMSLP's (typesetting is much harder than scanning).
dangrover 17y ago
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 http://wonderwarp.com/etude
- jacobolus 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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.
- avinashv 17y ago
  That looks awesome. I don't use a device that runs iPhone OS, but it's a brilliant idea and looks beautiful. As a side note: I'm a huge fan of Shovebox. I use quick jot at least once an hour.
djcapelis 17y ago
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 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 17y ago
  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_Ilyich) http://imslp.org/wiki/Dumka,_Op.59_(Tchaikovsky,_Pyotr_Ilyic... 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.
elblanco 17y ago
Lilypond is the music equivalent of TeX. The thought put into how the final result looks is amazing.
- lamby 17y ago
  Out of interest, have you seen MusiXTeX?
  - elblanco 17y ago
    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.
wingo 17y ago
And tweakable via Scheme to boot! http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/Interfaces-for-programmers#Interfaces-for-programmers http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/In...
gjm11 17y ago
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 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.
Luyt 17y ago
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 http://lilypond.org/switch/tour

49 points by sublemonic 17y ago

aaronblohowiak 17y ago

boo, gpl. lgpl would be fine

djcapelis 17y ago
Apparently the developers felt that the LGPL wouldn't be fine, given that they GPL'd it.
- devinj 17y ago
  Actually, most likely they thought it would have been fine. Just not as fine.
daeken 17y ago
While I personally believe the GPL to be a poor license (in fact, I don't consider it to be pro-freedom in the least), criticizing others' license choices is just obnoxious. If you dislike it, don't use the software. If you really don't like it, compete with them.

jazzychad 17y ago

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 http://www.beckenhorstpress.com/title.asp?id=HB317 [edit] link to recording: http://www.beckenhorstpress.com/audio/HB317.mp3 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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  Yep, you got it!

CoreDumpling 17y ago

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 http://www.denemo.org/index.php/Main_Page [2] http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page

klipt 17y ago
MuseScore can also export to LilyPond.
elblanco 17y ago
Oh great find for the sheet music archive! I'll now be drowning is music thanks!
nandemo 17y ago
Mutopia's got what you want: http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ Of course the catalog is only a fraction of IMSLP's (typesetting is much harder than scanning).

dangrover 17y ago

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 http://wonderwarp.com/etude

jacobolus 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
avinashv 17y ago
That looks awesome. I don't use a device that runs iPhone OS, but it's a brilliant idea and looks beautiful. As a side note: I'm a huge fan of Shovebox. I use quick jot at least once an hour.

djcapelis 17y ago

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 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 17y ago
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_Ilyich) http://imslp.org/wiki/Dumka,_Op.59_(Tchaikovsky,_Pyotr_Ilyic... 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.

elblanco 17y ago

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

lamby 17y ago
Out of interest, have you seen MusiXTeX?
- elblanco 17y ago
  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.

wingo 17y ago

And tweakable via Scheme to boot! http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/Interfaces-for-programmers#Interfaces-for-programmers http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/In...

gjm11 17y ago

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 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.

Luyt 17y ago

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 http://lilypond.org/switch/tour