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You have to be joking, or you've proved my point.

LilyPond doesn't do 1/10000th of what Finale does.

Ask any serious musician who prepares real scores for a living, and they will laugh...

if they even knew what it is.

Does lilypond have a UI?

Lilypond's "interface" it looks like the files that Finale saves.

Can Lilypond play back my score via MIDI for aural proofreading, the fastest way to catch mistakes before they hit the orchestra?

Can it automatically prepare parts from a 25-line score?

Can it automatically transpose an entire song to a different key? Can it cut and paste music between different instruments, automatically transposing for different instruments

Can it take a five-part harmonized line and split it out into five separate staves?

Currently, free software does not fill this niche, and seems likely never to.

LilyPond.

I'm not exactly a musician, but I'm most notably someone who cares about written word, graphical design, and such - in short, I'd be a printer.

And I think GNU Lilypond absolutely rules. Definitely this is the best notation software I've seen - produces easily the most beautiful computer-printed scores I've seen. All this free.

I like it because it allows me to work on musical scores just as easily as I work on any text. Also, it has - if I need it - support for macro-like constructs, so it also mildly interests me as a programmer. I think that on the time I've spent with the program, have also developed my own understanding on the fundamental issues of music.

And it's also very cool as an interchange medium - the program reads plain text files that use very readable but at the same time flexible notation. I can put snippets of score on text-only places. Mouse-based note entry has ever since only made me angry! (If I want a quarter E, I'll write "e4", not click around for a minute trying to get it look right!) Also, I recently discovered the elegance of Lilypond's LaTeX2e interfacing; this is probably very important when producing well-typeset music-related documents...

Also, be sure to read their "marketing material" (the "switch" tour and the essay on computerized music engraving, right on the front page). Every open source project should take note - a great way to market the software.

There are still shortcomings (some of the more recently added features are not feature-complete or are, from what I heard, hacks that miraculously work - and also the MIDI output needs semi-manual unrolling of loops, which is sort of annoying)...

I'm not very fluent reading and writing music, but sometimes I have to ;). A good alternative (better according to most "real" musicians/composers I know) is Sibelius. They have an OS X version and they even have a special price when you upgrade from Finale.

There's also Lilypond, a very good free (as in speech) software that you can get through Fink and use with Apple's X11 implementation. Personally that's what I use, and it gives me very nice scores.

I hope this helps!

Probably, you'll rather use lilypond which is an updated version of MusiXTeX. There are a number of GUIs avalable, see GuidForLilyPond for a list. I think the one to use is denemo.

Probably, you'll rather use lilypond which is an updated version of MusiXTeX. There are a number of GUIs avalable, see GuidForLilyPond for a list. I think the one to use is denemo.

While I think the notation editor really only creates rough draught scores rather than professional, you could check out Rosegarden-4 for GNU/Linux.

It also exports to Lilypond format, which does do professional score typesetting.

Other options can be found here, though some of the apps are bit obscure.

This is yet another reason that LaTeX is Good.

If you're doing anything at all with computer algebra (rather common in applied math and engineering science anyway) you'll find you can get maple or mathematica to output your equations at any stage of processing in TeX. They even have little TeX-rendering front ends now.

This is really really nifty, because it means that you can play with the algebraic form of an equation (or a whole table of related equations) and see what form of the same equation typesets the most clearly and readably -- with a far lower probability of making typographic errors!

I did a lot of the equations for my thesis like this, in the late 80's -- using cut-and-paste between different virtual terminals under X windows to get the TeX output from command-line maple and mathematica into my vi session where I was writing my thesis--in plain TeX.

Great reproducibility and easier to keep stuff organised too. It means you can save the maple or mathematica workbook in the same directory as that section of your thesis (and the bibtex file associated with it, and the fortran/C source you also had maple/mathematic spit out to test numerical approaches to solving the same problem).

Someone mentioned FrameMaker -- that was originally just a SunWindows WYSIWYG front-end to TeX. A long long time ago. It was too expensive, and there were several open source alternatives to preview your DVI output, some of which survive to this day.

If you play music with other people lilypond makes the most beautifully typeset music I've ever seen -- in LaTeX --and automates the transcription process for you as well. From the command line. Which means you can set it up as a web service for your muso buddies, who might be blowing a B-flat instrument, while you keep the master transcription in C for the piano. While there are lots of pointy-clicky windows apps that will do this, the typesetting quality is not nearly as good, and because they require someone pointing and clicking, it's much harder to use them as processing back ends to some other thing you might want to do. e.g. a transcription service that you and your friends need in order to play stuff together. But a way to get rehearsal copies to them quickly without a lot of fiddling around in Windows.

Let's see, no time to download and look at the slashcrap code. Hmm. Removing punctuation and small keypad. Would percentage of junk characters count too? Maybe I will try to inserst some random text here, and hope that someone will fix this stuupit lameness filter. Maybe lowercasing the layout helps?

A language which lets you define a piece of music by defining what note to play at what time with what instrument, but also what sample to play where, and where what lyrics go.

Audio output is currently basic MIDI, mainly because the core LilyPond hackers are more interested in notation.

does an appropriate language for defining a piece of music exist, a LaTeX for musicians?

Yes. There are lots of pieces of music software that are more or less comparable to LaTeX, in that they do specific tasks from the command-line and textual input: Csound for synthesis, SoX for audio manipulation, Lilypond for notation typesetting. They're all excellent pieces of software.

But I guess there aren't as many people who need to do only synthesis, audio manipulation, or notation typesetting as there are people wanting software that only typesets text. Music is always going to have more of a real-time, interactive nature.

right you are. anyone with a bit of a background in classical music knows that there are piles of stuff waiting out there that most of the game-playing world hasn't heard. most of the *world* in fact. midifying some of it would be an excellent idea.

i wonder if there isn't already a companion project to lilypond or mutopia for MIDI or other simple versions of classical tunes..?

nalfy.

It's not exactly a music composition program, but it's an amazing typesetter. I have yet to see better output from a computer program, Finale can't even compare. More information is available here.

Lilypond is to Finale what LaTex is to Word.

If you are comforatble editing a rather simple text representation of music, Lilypond will produce beautiful scores for you.

the score is not copyrighted, you can rearrange it as you see fit, as you can with any music over 65 years old as in my understanding (IANAL). The performances ARE copyrighted, now if you want to spend a few hundred thousand dollars paying for your favorite orchestra to rehearse/record your favorite classical songs, so be it. The music is free the performance is not.

I understand all that... I believe I noted that in my original query. And, indeed, perhaps I should have mentioned that I am aware of the Mutopia Project which uses GNU Lilypond to put classic scores online. But I was hoping that there might be some repository of performances of classical music in digital format which had been made freely available.

I really don't expect to find much in the way of the Cleveland Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, or other orchestras with big-ticket CDs. But this world has a wealth of good quality small-name orchestra, including some of the better University orchestras. I wouldn't be surprised if some of those were willing to release recordings of their concerts for free. (I mean, heck, sometimes the performances are free to the public.)

-Rob

Aaah, too bad Mutopia doesn't have Strauss... You could have posted it as a Lilypond file or something =)

popular sheet music: napsterize that!

You can always go to MIDI Farm, download your favorite songs, fire up LilyPond, and print it.

18:52:38 appel ~$ gnuclient
bash: gnuclient: command not found
18:52:40 appel ~$ apt-cache search gnuclient
18:52:46 appel ~$ emacsclient foe
Waiting for Emacs...^C
18:52:50 appel ~$ zgrep gnuclient /root/Contents-powerpc.gz usr/bin/gnuclient editors/gnuserv
18:52:58 appel ~$ su -c 'apt-get install gnuserv'

I've contributed a Bach Prelude to the project, and it was definitely a worthwile experience. I hope to contribute again sometime soon.

With regard to its legality, you really ought to read their page dedicated to legal issues: here is the Google-cached version. In a nutshell, there are three sets of copyrights to take into account: The Composer's, the Editor's, and the Typesetter's. The typesetter's doesn't matter, because in this case, the computer (or more specifically, Lilypond) does that. We try to avoid the editor's copyright as well, by (surprise!) inputting from music that isn't edited! These are referred to as "Urtext" versions.

So taking both those things into account, it's perfectly legal to input music from an unedited score if the composer has been dead for at least 70 years.

Now on the technical side, music typesetting is not an exact science, and Lilypond, though mature and under very active development (current release is 1.3.124, I believe), still has its weaknesses. Though much of the output it produces is very readable and usable, sometimes it's less than ideal. You can tweak almost anything, but it often requires knowledge of its complicated implementation (C++ and Guile, I believe). Not only that, but it's SLOW! Typesetting a piece of 8 or 9 pages on my PII-300 96MB RAM takes about a minute, which sucks when you're going back to make small corrections. The run-time increases exponentially (it seems, that's not an exact observation) with more voices and more pages.

Input is done in plain text, in a terse-as-you-can-handle grammar, which is fairly simple to understand, though a bit more complicated once you actually try to assemble all the voices into a completed score. The example that's on the lily home page (I'm guessing it'll be slashdotted before long) is:

\relative c'' { \key c \minor; r8 c16 b c8 g as c16 b c8 d | g,4 }

Which is pretty self-explanitory. Every note is assumed to be the closest note of that name, unless you override (see the last g, the comma means down an octave), every note is assumed to have a duration of the note that came before unless you override, the pipe is a bar check, and it'll warn you if the bar doesn't end up where you told it to be. Really not too difficult, especially if you download an already completed score to base your work on.

The project is fairly small at the moment (42 scores, many of them different movements of the same work), especially compared to Gutenberg, but it can only grow. The biggest problem I've run into is finding unedited copies from which to input.

I'd encourage anyone to contribute! I look forward to the day where there are great archives where you can download expired music for quick reference, or for scholarly curiosity. It'll never replace printed, published music, of course, there's nothing like having a real, bound copy, but it could be great for certain things.

The web page is also available at http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/ (in case www.mutopiaproject.com goes down), though it may be the same machine, I'm not sure.

--

If I run your script, I get roughly your results, but if I run:

#!/bin/bash
i=0
while [ "$i" -lt 100 ]
do
lynx -head -dump http://www.hotmail.com/ >> /var/tmp/hotmail
i=$((i+1))
done
grep Server /var/tmp/hotmail | sort | uniq -c

I get

23:29:17 appel ~$ ./thm
95 Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b
5 Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0

about what netcraft reports.

Jan

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

It's still a bit hairy to install, but I beats me why anyone is still using Lilo. With grub, you get an editable list of boot images. If you messed up, the only thing you need is figure-out where a kernel is, and you've got tab-completion to find it. No messing around with boot floppies.

So, can anyone tell me why she's using Lilo for her distribution?

Jan

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

My GNU/Linux box is a PowerPC (ppc), and it runs Linux as well as glibc2.1, but why do I think `Package Foo for Linux' won't run over here?

It may be quite a while until the ignorant lot get this, but we could do with a bit more enlightened view from /.

Jan

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

In a few, exceptional cases, it might be that you can't tell the difference between a quarter an a sixteenth note with rests. But in *most* cases there is a difference. (As a viola player, I can assure you that there is a difference between a whole note pizzicato, and a quarter note.) So why draw focus to the exeptional case where the generally expected possibility MIDI->notation would maybe not be problematic?

Also, you shot yourself in the foot, or at least prove that you've missed the point, when you say:

...might need to be translated from it's standard representation to something shorter, in order to make your midi sound right.

Moderators, what am I missing here?

Jan

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

What specific typesetting qualities of Finale do you like best? We can change LilyPond, Free Software, remember? (Please refer to hardcopy, we've had complaints from people that saw the PNGs).

Btw, an important reason to use or develop LilyPond is the fact that it's Free Software. The (arguably) poor output quality of <your proprietary package here> isn't as important to me, although it doesn't hurt to be better :-)

Jan

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

Jan

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

Jan

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

17:27:24 appel ~/usr/src/lilypond$ lilypond -f ps scales.fly
GNU LilyPond 1.3.31.jcn5
[./scm/lily.scm]
Parsing...[./ly/init.fly[./ly/declarations.ly[./sc m/generic-property.scm][./ly/nederlands. ly][./ly/chord-modifiers.ly[./scm/chord-names.scm] ][./ly/script.ly[./scm/script.scm]][./ly /generic-paper.ly[./scm/paper.scm]][./ly/paper20.l y[./ly/params.ly[./ly/a4.ly][./ly/paper. ly][./ly/engraver.ly[./ly/auto-beam-settings.ly][. /ly/auto-beam-settings.ly]]]][./ly/midi. ly[./scm/midi.scm][./ly/performer.ly]][./ly/textsc ripts.ly][./ly/spanners.ly][./ly/propert y.ly]][scales.fly]]
Interpreting music...[3]
elapsed time: 0.12 seconds
Preprocessing elements... [./afm/feta20.afm]
Calculating column positions...[0]
paper output to scales.ps...[./ps/lilyponddefs.ps][./ps/lily.ps]

Jan

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

Here's your first scale in LilyPond (scale.fly):

c d e f g a b c

For more information, see LilyPond user's manual (170k).

If that's all really too difficult, there's still hope. As a separate project, work is underway to build a GUI (GTK+) frontend to LilyPond. Check out Denemo: denemo.sourceforge.net. Still in its early stages, but already usable.

There was a discussion on the SCORE mailing list the other day about how rhythm, pitch and ornaments can be typed-in (of course) most efficiently. People tend to prefer seperating them: all pitches first then the rhythm, then marks.

Of course, when you're not using your favourite text editor(TM) for entry, but some integrated notation software, you may find yourself to be back in the eternal computing fields from hell. From the SCORE mailing list:

&gt BTW has anyone ever answered Yes to "Save this staff of input to a file?"

All the time. If there's a crash while entering, say, the 19th staff of a 20 stave score, all those temp files can recreate your losses much faster then completely retyping. This still happens to me maybe a half dozen times per year.

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

I know of at least two cases where people asked us questions about installing GNU/Linux, only so that they could use LilyPond instead of Finale. If you fall for pretty faces, maybe Windows is for you.

Jan.

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

LilyPond also features MIDI output and comes with a separate program (midi2ly) for converting MIDI to LilyPond's input language. However, trying to convert MIDI to sheet music is a rather useless undertaking, IME. Rich MIDI lacks lots of notation features, such as accents, ties (as opposed to a note of double length), chords vs. voices, clefs, grouping into staffs (two voices on one staff, or each on its own), voices that switch staffs, beaming, arpeggios (vs quickly played notes) grace notes and ornaments in general, flageolets, fingering, enharmonics. So, if you want a real nice score, you'll have to edit the resulting score by hand, anyway. It is this editing that takes most of the time, not the entry of plain notes (that is, if you can touch type).

As a separate project, work is underway to build a GUI (GTK+) frontend to LilyPond. Check out Denemo: denemo.sourceforge.net. Still in its early stages, but already usable.

RoseGarden is basically an orphaned project. To quote Elliot Lee: "It isn't going anywhere any time soon." The last post on the Rosegarden mailing list is dated december, 6 1999. There are 2 branches. The first one is the X11 program, and hasn't changed much since the time Han-Wen named LilyPond as a pun on Rosegarden three years ago. They are also doing a complete ground-up rewrite of the package (slated to be 3.0), using Client/Server architecture, CORBA, GUILE, C++ and GTK. This all means that noone is working on the usable 2.x sources, and 3.x doesn't even compile. 2.x doesn't have any LilyPond support, but it is planned for 3.x

Jan.

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

LilyPond also features MIDI output and comes with a separate program (midi2ly) for converting MIDI to LilyPond's input language. However, trying to convert MIDI to sheet music is a rather useless undertaking, IME. Rich MIDI lacks lots of notation features, such as accents, ties (as opposed to a note of double length), chords vs. voices, clefs, grouping into staffs (two voices on one staff, or each on its own), voices that switch staffs, beaming, arpeggios (vs quickly played notes) grace notes and ornaments in general, flageolets, fingering, enharmonics. So, if you want a real nice score, you'll have to edit the resulting score by hand, anyway. It is this editing that takes most of the time, not the entry of plain notes (that is, if you can touch type).

As a separate project, work is underway to build a GUI (GTK+) frontend to LilyPond. Check out Denemo: denemo.sourceforge.net. Still in its early stages, but already usable.

RoseGarden is basically an orphaned project. To quote Elliot Lee: "It isn't going anywhere any time soon." The last post on the Rosegarden mailing list is dated december, 6 1999. There are 2 branches. The first one is the X11 program, and hasn't changed much since the time Han-Wen named LilyPond as a pun on Rosegarden three years ago. They are also doing a complete ground-up rewrite of the package (slated to be 3.0), using Client/Server architecture, CORBA, GUILE, C++ and GTK. This all means that noone is working on the usable 2.x sources, and 3.x doesn't even compile. 2.x doesn't have any LilyPond support, but it is planned for 3.x

Jan.

--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | www.lilypond.org

the last 1% I need to do is an effective MIDI system that includes [...] notation software (outputting the midi tracks to sheet music)