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The automatic formatting of LilyPond is much better. The workflow is similar to TeX: you write content in a text format and mark it up, and the software takes care of the rest. The quality LilyPond can achieve is very good. With MuseScore, though the visual interface is more comfortable for many and has a smaller learning curve, there's far too much manual adjustment necessary in scores of reasonable complexity, and usually has to be done again when a piece is modified. It's possible to get the best of both though, by importing a MuseScore into Denemo, which uses LilyPond for typesetting. Some examples here show the difference, compared to using MuseScore alone.

I'm glad that it sounds like there is a way using denemo to go from MuseScore to LilyPond. Is there a way to go the other direction? Having the scores in a format with easy portability and long term viability seems very important.

The automatic formatting of LilyPond is much better. The workflow is similar to TeX: you write content in a text format and mark it up, and the software takes care of the rest. The quality LilyPond can achieve is very good. With MuseScore, though the visual interface is more comfortable for many and has a smaller learning curve, there's far too much manual adjustment necessary in scores of reasonable complexity, and usually has to be done again when a piece is modified. It's possible to get the best of both though, by importing a MuseScore into Denemo, which uses LilyPond for typesetting. Some examples here show the difference, compared to using MuseScore alone.

You're thinking of LilyPond.

Parent is correct. Clearly, a lot of slashdotters don't know the difference between notation and DAW software. No, Reaper, Ardour, and Audacity are not notation programs. If notation is what you want the best F/OSS solution I've seen is MuseScore. I have completely replace Finale/Sibelius with this for my notation needs. Note that my needs are strictly for notation for printing though. I am not doing any MIDI creation from it so I can't speak to that. I don't believe it supports playing back with soundfonts (it includes the nasty MIDI patches mentioned in the OP). As an aside if you're really serious about making printed music look nice you should take a look at LilyPond though it doesn't have an editing GUI so it's more for your magnum opus rather than the quick and dirty song development more typical.

These projects were most likely tax exempt 501(c)3 entities.

These projects were most likely no tax-visible entity at all. I'm working on a donation basis on LilyPond (the GNU music typesetter). I can write out bills (for which I'll have to pay income tax), and I actually accepted a donation of that size (which was from a private person actually without the need for a bill, but I also write bills) recently. But the bills I write are for the purpose of working on LilyPond, but they are not bills by the project.

The point is: I can accept substantial amounts of money and write bills for it (and be accountable for it), but the project as a whole can't do that. There just is no dedicated, controlled, and tax-visible money sink somewhere. And if somebody wanted to donate such an amount of money to the project rather than a single person, this would be rather hard to pull off.

Lilypond uses Guile extensively, and as time goes on, more and more of its code has been moving from C++ to Guile. For those not in the know, Lilypond is a typesetting program for music.

The learning curve for Lilypond is really no worse than for any other text-based music typesetting software -- and far easier than, say, the TeX music packages. ABC is a little more simple on the surface, but is so much less flexible as to make it useless for complicated music. MusicXML seems to be a good transport format, but as parent points out, it's clunky: like any other XML format, everything is perfectly readable and will take a year and a day to type.

Lilypond, which seems to me to be the best option for open-source notation software, is probably not a worthwhile system for creating on-the-fly snippets for web pages. Something JavaScript based would be nice for that, and it seems likely that there could be wiki plugins that could be used to create musical examples without huge dependencies (much less specific versions of any given large software packages), or a knowledge of how to use these large, complicated notation software packages. There might still be the problem of being limited to simple examples, but do we really need all of Lilypond and its dependencies to create an example of a Phrygian scale?

I believe that LilyPond wins the geekiness award when it comes to music typography. It's open source too!

As recommeded by several above, Lilypond is worth a look. See some slightly more complicated examples in the Lilypond docs at: http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/Common-notation-for-vocal-music#Common-notation-for-vocal-music

That looked as good as any print music I've ever seen.

I recommend that you read Lilypond's essay on the topic. This is an OK start, but there is a long way to go before this is even remotely as good as professionally printed music. This is even worse than Finale scores.* I suggest you look at Noteflight or Scorch for other examples. Specifically, the noteheads are small, the stems are too long, and the whole rest should be centered in the measure. Maybe Han-Wen can give him some pointers.

* I used to hate reading Finale scores back in the 90's. That was hot shit back then, but I always found it sterile and blocky. Lifeless, boring, etc. Luckily most homebrew guys have switched to Sibelius, which is somewhat better.

I love Lilypond, but your mention of it only reinforces GP's point. It has a steep learning curve, and there are several ways to do anything.
Unlike a word processor, the documentation for Lilypond *really does* need to be over 627 pages long.

Try writing notated music on a computer and then get back to me on how hard writing and manipulating text is.

There's an app for that.

Try using them. I've searched, too. I prefer using a [fairly simple] GUI when I do music notation, not command line style things.

I haven't tried NoteEdit or Brahms. I've tried some GUI based ones though, and usually they're kinda clunky, not terribly well designed, and not easy to get used to. Similar, actually, to the response I got when I used Finale. IMO, Sibelius did a very good job with the UI and how the notation inputs worked.

This or that application doesn't work on Linux or there isn't a comparable one (my favorite to mention is Sibelius's music notation software, aptly named Sibelius [or Coda Music's Finale, but I hate Finale]), it's not as easy to use, hardware, etc.

Some music notation software on linux (not complete list, just a quick search):

• Lilypond ( http://www.lilypond.org/ )
• Denemo ( http://denemo.sourceforge.net/index.html )
• Rosegarden ( http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/ )
• NoteEdit ( http://noteedit.berlios.de/ )
• Brahms ( http://brahms.sourceforge.net/ )

IIRC, while the sequence of notes is out of copyright the design and layout of the page on which they're printed isn't. So technically the publisher could well be in the right. IANAL, though.

So if you read the sheet music, and transcribed the notes into music publishing software like Lilypond, the copyright wouldn't apply anymore, right?

Have a look at Rosegarden for notation and lilypond for typesetting.

It would be more in the spirit of a project like this if they allowed open formats like lilypond and ABC

Sad they do not promote Lilypond more. Many PDFs on the site have been typeset using Lilypond, but only the PDFs are available.
Lilypond: http://lilypond.org/

Yeah, because people get extremely excited when they start... um... partitioning drives! And booting the operating system! And they can, like... find out that no ports are open on their system, whatever that means!... and it's good to know that you can use the computer from some other place - if only they had another computer.

Let's face it, there's a TON of good open source software, but a lot of it isn't exactly "marketable". You can't sell open source to people by telling how much butt GRUB kicks. ("Yeah, it displays a menu and starts up the operating system. So?") A lot of open source is just neat tools for marginal purposes: people pick them because they fit their needs. They're not out there to make everyone happy. You can really only "sell" programs that have a big audience. Also, there's the element of "fun". Using productivity software is fun; you get results. On the other hand, not a lot of people are so enthusiastic when they have to boot the computer; selling GRUB is harder. A lot of people don't care about their bootloader as long as it kicks the kernel running.

Some tools are easy to market even when they have specialist target group, because everyone understands the basics of the field - say, in case of GNU Lilypond, everyone knows a little bit about music and notation, so everyone understands that the program they're "selling" here is useful to the musicians, composers and music typesetters (and are intrigued by the information found here), and the musicians, composers and music typesetters will be even further intrigued when they see how well the software fits their needs. It's also nice because making music is nice and makes people happy (or at least emotional). Now, try selling gparted. Everyone, even the specialists, think partitioning drives is dull... yes, you can make the sales speech interesting, but you can't make drive partitioning fun or frequent enough.

Lilypond. Orders of magnitude better than Rosegarden.

I have to agree that lilypond http://www.lilypond.org/ really is good. It can be used to typeset music into a book or paper so that is useful to music students. It produces MIDI output for quick checks. AND, it is cross-platform so that it can be shared easily. My nine year old caught on to the coding in just an hour or two.
--
Solar for a song: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Lilypond beats the snot out of Sibelius and Finale. It produces the most beautiful music with the default typeset of any other program. Copy and paste work too. However, you have to learn to code a little.

Lilypond is the OSS music notation software, and has been around for a long time. It's code-based, and I guess it's closer to Score than to Finale or Sibelius. But it produces pretty impressive stuff once you wrangle with it enough. There are some GUIs for Lilypond, including a Win32 plugin for jEdit, but I've never used them. Lilypond, the gnu project music typesetter.

The only sane thing you could do is get out your favourite paint program (not score program, they probably copyright the output of it) and draw your own score

Try LilyPond: "music notation for everyone."

I've found some goodies at the Mutopia Project. This website has many out-of-copyright pieces that have been typeset by volunteers and uploaded for all to use. Music is available in PDF, MIDI, and LilyPond (an open-source Finale-ish format).

If published before 1923. . .

Like Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

In short, almost none of it can be legally scanned *and distributed*.

And in any case, he doesn't actually want scans, even if he doesn't know that. What he wants is music that has been digitally encoded in a free and open standard, so that there are readers the can interepret and print it.

The basically means ABC and Lilypond files:

http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/ABC-FAQ.html

http://lilypond.org/web/

KFG

I work a lot with Drupal and see this on the message boards often. "I'd like to see this feature built and I'm willing to pay XXX for it" Someone builds the feature and cashes in. Innovation and capitalism at work.

Some open-source projects have seemed to operate almost entirely on this principle. Take, for instance, LilyPond. Development for some time seemed to be done almost entirely by core developers who seemed to be getting paid for custom features. Spending time on these custom features, though, meant that other, more basic features were sometimes missing or lacking. (I wish I could give examples, but it has been a few months since I have used LilyPond.)

Now, the LilyPond site seems to emphasize the involvement of other developers, documentation writers, etc. There is a FAQ item that leads to a page about sponsoring features, but I wonder if the focus has shifted more toward getting other volunteer contributors. The "call-for-help" page cites these reasons for wanting help:

Hopefully, together we can address problems in the LilyPond development process, among others

* Stable releases don't happen often enough.
* Development is too much centralized.
* The learning curve is too steep.

I would say only the first reason really applies to Debian, but it is interesting that LilyPond seems to be taking the opposite approach to solving the problem.

I work a lot with Drupal and see this on the message boards often. "I'd like to see this feature built and I'm willing to pay XXX for it" Someone builds the feature and cashes in. Innovation and capitalism at work.

Some open-source projects have seemed to operate almost entirely on this principle. Take, for instance, LilyPond. Development for some time seemed to be done almost entirely by core developers who seemed to be getting paid for custom features. Spending time on these custom features, though, meant that other, more basic features were sometimes missing or lacking. (I wish I could give examples, but it has been a few months since I have used LilyPond.)

Now, the LilyPond site seems to emphasize the involvement of other developers, documentation writers, etc. There is a FAQ item that leads to a page about sponsoring features, but I wonder if the focus has shifted more toward getting other volunteer contributors. The "call-for-help" page cites these reasons for wanting help:

Hopefully, together we can address problems in the LilyPond development process, among others

* Stable releases don't happen often enough.
* Development is too much centralized.
* The learning curve is too steep.

I would say only the first reason really applies to Debian, but it is interesting that LilyPond seems to be taking the opposite approach to solving the problem.

I work a lot with Drupal and see this on the message boards often. "I'd like to see this feature built and I'm willing to pay XXX for it" Someone builds the feature and cashes in. Innovation and capitalism at work.

Some open-source projects have seemed to operate almost entirely on this principle. Take, for instance, LilyPond. Development for some time seemed to be done almost entirely by core developers who seemed to be getting paid for custom features. Spending time on these custom features, though, meant that other, more basic features were sometimes missing or lacking. (I wish I could give examples, but it has been a few months since I have used LilyPond.)

Now, the LilyPond site seems to emphasize the involvement of other developers, documentation writers, etc. There is a FAQ item that leads to a page about sponsoring features, but I wonder if the focus has shifted more toward getting other volunteer contributors. The "call-for-help" page cites these reasons for wanting help:

Hopefully, together we can address problems in the LilyPond development process, among others

* Stable releases don't happen often enough.
* Development is too much centralized.
* The learning curve is too steep.

I would say only the first reason really applies to Debian, but it is interesting that LilyPond seems to be taking the opposite approach to solving the problem.

Tell me a piece of consumer software (sorry this doesn't include servers, compilers and hacker tools), that has become successful on Linux.

It depends on what you mean by "successful." If you mean market penetration, then not much. But I look at "successful" as whether it does what I need it to do and does it better.

For starters, GNU Lilypond, which is light-years ahead of software like Finale in its flexibility. True, it doesn't (yet) have all of the features of all the commercial products, but it has the hooks to allow users to add functionality. I'll never go back to graphical notation entry again. The Lilypond interface is much more efficient.

Ardour is another great project. Again, it provides flexibility that doesn't exist in commercial DAWs.

Of course there's always Emacs (or vi!). Show me a text editor with more timesaving and productivity-enhancing features.

I get along just fine with OpenOffice. Why should I shell out hundreds of dollars for software I don't need?

If these appliations don't work for you, that's fine, stick to the commercial stuff. But don't tear down others because they've found a different way that works better for them.

They call it "coin operated coding," but are they going to let users choose what work their money gets used to fund? So if I want, say, better window transparency, then I can donate $20 and he'll spend 15 or 30 minutes working on that someday?

I don't know if Dunc-Tank will work that way, but GNU Lilypond works that way. Users write up proposals with specs and submit them to the developers, who decide on the appropriate charge for the work. Users have been known to pool resources to get some pretty amazing features added.

It's a fantastic way to develop Free Software, but it requires developers who are very responsive to users and able to look past their own assumptions and ways of doing things.

The GNU project adopted Scheme (with the Guile interpreter) as its official scripting language. Applications are not meant to be written in Scheme, but applications can expose functionality to the user through a Scheme interface. That is to say, plugins for extensible applications could be written in Scheme. The Gimp is one of the most noteworthy applications with a Scheme interface, and much of the lower-level functionality of GNU Lilypond is reached with Scheme.

This is patently false. New stuff comes out of copyright every day. However, coming out of copyright is not the same thing as becoming available to the public. Clearly this is where Projet Gutenberg comes in.

One enormous area I'm personnally interested in is sheet music. Some of the music I'm interested in playing has come out of copyright decades or even centuries ago. No one is going to reclaim copyright on Mozart's requiem for instance. Yet it is by and large not available to the public because translating original manuscript sheet music into something that modern musicians can play without too much trouble is a huge undertaking.

Yet I have no doubt that this will eventually happen. PG already has a section devoted to sheet music. The tools are beginning to appear : lilypond is a superb Free music engraving software package. I'm personnally working on music OCR software, and others are as well I'm sure. Eventually this will work out well I think.

The public is in the process of reclaiming what is theirs, this is pretty much unstoppable right now.

I have never improved faster than when I recorded myself.

Seconded! It can be very embarrassing listening to yourself (trust me, it's worse when singing than playing an instrument), but if you grit your teeth and do it, it can really help. Once you've persevered enough to be able to listen to yourself without cringing, you'll probably find other people like listening to you as well!

You don't need any high technology to do it, of course; when I was learning piano an old handheld tape recorder was plenty. (It also catches all the "Whoops!"s and "Hang on, I can get this bit..."s.) A musician's most valuable tool is his or her ears; as long as you're listening carefully to yourself, you'll improve, so use whatever helps you do that.

Cubase is probably overkill for this kind of thing; if I was doing it in software, I'd probably use a simple audio editor like Amadeus II. But I'd certainly recommend Cubase for serious recording. As other posters mentioned, Audacity is also good for basic wave editing. Another package I'd recommend is Lilypond for engraving (i.e. typesetting and printing) music; it uses its own textual language which can be a pain to learn, but it produces very clear and natural notation.

But don't forget the old joke on how you get to Carnegie Hall: practise!

I've been a amateur drummer for 25 years, and have tried a few software packages, but here are the ones I actually find useful.

Under Windows, for overdubbing wav and midi I mostly use Cakewalk (warning: link contains annoying self-playing music). I use the cheaper Home Studio. They have a real product differentiation problem as Sonar is the expensive product, and then they market or bundle cheaper versions that may cover your needs just fine (its hard to tell from the product descriptions which features are grayed out). I use Cakewalk because the Windows drivers can be used in a very low-latency mode, and I always have a Windows laptop kicking around. I have not liked the scoring side of Cakewalk.

Also under Windows, I have used Sibelius (version 3 and 4). It is a phenominal scoring program that produces great looking sheet music. This is the only thing I do with a PC that I think is really better than without the PC. If you score with a program that plays back what you've written via midi, you can correct many mistakes on the fly. Sibelius is unfortuately still phenominally expensive for my uses, and I've never purchased it (nor has anyone I know).

Under linux, the equivalent of Cakewalk is Rosegarden. It is very impressive at the moment. Building it is a royal pain for me. It doesn't use your standard autotools driven make, it uses Scons (not in my distribution). Scons requires a Python module that's not available in the stable version of Python. Hey, people writing free software can use whatever they want, its just a shame some people won't try their product because of the barrier to entry. I've had latency issues with Rosegarden + JACK which I think can be sorted out but I have to decide if I want to run the tools as root or pull in the whole SELinux overhead + realtime module (no different than Cakewalk in Windows -- it does not work well as non-admin). Rosegarden's scoring is coming along but not quite there for me.

For scoring under Linux, I'm using Lilypond. Lilypond is phenominal, but many won't like it because its markup-based (like writing Latex). You have to go through the compile cycle to view what you've written, and dump midi to hear it. Fortunately for me, rythym section music is very repetitive. The quality of printed music it can produce is unmatched. I'm sure more programs will start using Lilypond as a processing back-end.

All I would use software for is tuning (not even a proper tuner, just a MIDI sequencer and a file that plays an A, and only because I don't have a metronome), Recording (rarely) and some music typesetting or printing. As for recommendations for software I would look into Lilypond (http://lilypond.org/web/) for typesetting, and Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) for recording and tuning (if you don't have a metronome). And as a previous poster said, you will not be using this stuff during a "normal" practice session. You would print music off of Lilypond, and once you have tuned up, you will have no need of audacity unless you are recording which will not often be the case.

But how about the other areas of study? I used to take music theory and people would rant and rave about their Macs or one of various composing suites in Windows. I tried explaining that Linux has (certainly more affordable) solutions to offer in this department too but no one would even listen to me. It's not like they were mixing platinum selling records, they were just looking for software to write sheet music with.

Ironically, the only area that Linux can (could?) compete at the moment is in mixing platinum selling records, with software like Ardour.

For scorewriting there really is nothing that can compete with Sibelius on Windows or Mac - even Finale doesn't really come close when it comes to ease of use - and ultimately that is what is important for such applications. The software should be transparent to the user, and not require a degree in computer science to figure out (for example LilyPond).

Personally I think that what the open-source community needs in general terms is more marketing.

Yeah! Open source needs marketing. I think the developers just are too modest, as in "Oh, if this thing is any good, it will sell itself". Well, may be true, but they also need to catch people's attention by telling them how good it is.

Open source folks often don't try to communicate this properly. They don't try to answer people's questions. They make the information available, they just don't try to make it really all that well accessible. "Oh, we're just building the software, here's the download, here's the documentation. If you have any questions, RTFM/RTFS/RTF technical FAQ". (One of my big peeves is too technical FAQs - if I've never heard of the program, I assume the FAQs could cover some really basic questions, as in "What it is, what it does, what it needs to run" - not "This program blows up when I do X with Y" for pages and pages.)

For example, if I'm trying to find a CMS, and need to dig five minutes through the site to find out what database systems it supports, that's a problem. If they said up front "needs PHP (safe mode not supported) and MySQL" I might not have needed to waste five minutes on the site to know that I can't run the program on my web host. =)

Firefox folks are doing this right: "Here's a good web browser. People say it's good. Here's why it's so good and popular right now." They aren't really "selling" the thing as in "buy buy buy", they just have a refined way of telling what their software is good for and answering why you should use it.

If you want to see really amazing OSS marketing, try LilyPond (see the "Dive into" and the essay). This is how to do the thing.

I've tried Rosegarden. It's not bad. It's not as good as GarageBand or Tracktion (both are Mac programs) for recording loops and using effects. Also you may have a hard time getting it to play well with Mandriva. I recommend using Redhat if you're going to use Rosegarden. Among the things that Rosegarden does better than GB1 are MIDI export, score view, mid-song key/meter changes. That's because GB1 doesn't do those things at all! GB2 does 2 of those things, but I haven't tried it out yet.

All in all, you probably need about 3 or 4 different programs if you wanted to do everything using free software. Psycle (Windows, sorry) for loops/effects (for electronica), Rosegarden for MIDI, Lilypond for engraving scores (for classical), Ardour for mixing and editing. Some of these apps will have overlapping features, of course, and they don't all run on the same platform.

Vergessen Sie nicht Aeolus für Orgelmusik!

This is not a complete list, but Reason and GarageBand are not free nor open source, so these links might be useful:

- ardour, Digital Audio workstation / http://ardour.org/
- Rosegarden, audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and editing environment / http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
- LilyPond, music notation / http://lilypond.org/web/
- MusE MIDI/Audio sequencer / http://muse.serverkommune.de/
- Audacity, music editing station / http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
- Music Theory (free, not oss): http://www.musictheory.net/ and http://andyvn.ath.cx/Software-Aquallegro.php
- general link: http://linux-sound.org/

Cheers :-)

c4 d e f g a b c

There's the code for a quarter note C major scale. Super fast input.

I like LilyPond even more than Finale, actually. It's obviously not much in terms of a UI, but I find that if you're a good typist, it can be even faster. Plus it has a plethora of features. Fun.

LilyPond is a pretty good one, although it has an odd interface for some (text files) and is primarily a TeX interface to create pretty notation, not for playing. Personally, I find that the text input means less fighitng with a GUI to get it to do exactly what you want.

Like TeX, LilyPond uses text input rather than a GUI (although GUIs exist which output in LilyPond format). It is a little awkward at first, but with practice I (and several others) have found that inputting scores is much faster via this method.

lilypond -m score.ly

As an alternative you can use the ABC format. You can then use abc2ly to convert to Lilypond format and then use the command above to convert to MIDI. Example:

abc2ly score.abc
lilypond -m score.ly

I know you asked for open-source software, but if you are using a Mac or Windows machine you might want to look at Finale Notepad. It's free and should let you drag and drop notes to recreate the score and then play it back as MIDI.

I've used Rosegarden to enter a few pieces of music, and it's pretty good. I tend to focus more on tweaking the output to look exactly the way I want, and Rosegarden's output to Lilypond needed a fair bit of tweaking. Well, rewriting. :-)

There's probably a chance that Rosegarden's export to MUP or PMX or (various other options) works better. I've only recently started using Lilypond (after using MusixTeX for a while), so I'm probably not doing things in the most efficient way.

As mentioned by the AC, NoteEdit looks like a pretty good option too, though I haven't tried it myself. Hmmm... (reading features)... maybe I should. :)

Tried LilyPond?

It's not a drop-in replacement for Sibelius, or the various music packages which do score-printing like Cubase, Finale, etc., because it has no GUI -- it takes in a text file, and writes out a PDF. You get best results by writing the input by hand, but it's not easy (practically a full programming language), although there are converters from ABC, MIDI, and other popular formats (though with mediocre success). I believe it can be driven from RoseGarden, though I don't know how well.

However, it's well worth the effort, because its output is the best going -- much more natural and easier to read than any other engraving software, to the point where you don't mind not being able to tweak the output, drag bars around until it looks right, because LilyPond generally makes it look right itself!

While admittedly this is not unreasonable (music typesetting is hard!)

What's so hard about Lilypond? Is the premier Free tool for music typesetting actually hard to use, or is it just unfamiliar?

Currently I use LaTeX for documents and Lilypond for music.