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Related. Others? “Compiling” Music - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30625450 - March 2022 (44 comments) Lyp – The Lilypond Swiss Army Knife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13259590 - Dec 2016 (7 comments) Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What's wrong with computer music notation? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262 - July 2010 (36 comments) Open source typesetter for sheet music - https:/…
looks like this task could somehow be automated ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only use LilyPond for engraving, and MuseScore for input. They complement each other that way as a free software replacement for the usual commercial options.
The (former, IIRC) product manager for MuseScore (aka @tantacrul) has claimed that he thinks that MuseScore is now doing better engraving than LilyPond. He has a vested interest, obviously, but he's also a smart and conscientious human being.
A while back I built a music publishing company (long defunct) and used LilyPond to engrave all of our scores. I received comments from quite a few established composers that the engraving was the best they'd seen from any publisher. I ended up with a collection of macros I used for common tasks. Probably the most-used was a macro that manually overrode the positioning of an element to be more visually pleasing or le…
I started a personal folk song collection using ABC notation. For simple tunes ABC is fantastic, but now that I'm doing more choral/four-part works, I'm reaching for the more powerful tool. Yet there seems to be a huge gap between ABC (simple things done simply and in one way) and LilyPond (do literally anything you want following any format you want, dropping into Scheme as necessary). Ease-of-use/quality-of-life tooling to fill that gap is appealing.
P.S. I'd also love to hear the story of your music publishing venture. It sounds intriguing!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only use LilyPond for engraving, and MuseScore for input. They complement each other that way as a free software replacement for the usual commercial options.
The (former, IIRC) product manager for MuseScore (aka @tantacrul) has claimed that he thinks that MuseScore is now doing better engraving than LilyPond. He has a vested interest, obviously, but he's also a smart and conscientious human being.
EDIT: Deleted for copyright violation
What does Lilypond offer that other robust, free, and open-source notation programs like Musescore don’t?
Interesting that Music notation even seems to be a “challenge” to do with a computer, speaking as a complete layman. It seems like there is only a few note symbols to draw, at fixed positions. Can someone explain what makes good engraving good?
A somewhat ignorant TL;DR:
- It's probably not too difficult to render simple music in a bland, ugly way, in the same way that it's not too difficult to render ASCII text documents with a monospace font.
- When notation gets complicated it is tedious but somewhat routine to render music in a way that looks like total garbage: things are awkwardly smooshed together or spaced way too far apart; some symbols look "too small" alongside others when using uniform scaling; long lines that have to travel over multiple notes end up clashing and making the score unreadable; etc etc etc.
- Actually getting things right in a general-purpose musical notation program is hard hard work. I don't have any direct experience here but I am sure it's a nightmare and takes constant testing to figure all this stuff out.
I play jazz and don't fully believe in Western music notation :) So I can't speak too directly here on the intricacy. But I would highly recommend reading Knuth's TeX Book (and skimming the WEB source of TeX itself) just to get a sense of how many different decisions a typesetting / music notation program has to make.