Music Notation Software For Unix?

CapnCheapo asks: "I was just wondering if there has been any progress on a Finale-quality music notation system out there for Linux yet? There are plenty of sequencers and simple notation programs, but I need a program that can do heavy-duty scoring, (30 staves, transposition, score analysis, custom beaming) in a graphical environment. Lilypond is great for typsetting, but is not an ideal environment for playing with musical ideas. Thanks!"

Comments

Denemo

[Anonymous Coward]

my only suggestion would be denemo. It's a frontend to lilypond, but you can get playback on your notes as you enter them. Not what you're looking for, I'm sure, but anyway it's something

ABC plus lilypond

[laymusic]

I have a similar problem -- I don't need large numbers of staves but I'm transcribing renaissance music, so I need features that aren't present in low-end systems, and flexibility that isn't available in barline-based systems.

What I'm doing at the moment is using ABC for the data entry. This is because I can touch type this. There are attempts to provide GUI's for ABC, none of which is yet really usable for my purposes. However, there is a lot of really good command line based software that runs fast enough for me.

Then when I have what I want, I use the abc2ly converter that comes with lilypond to do the actual typesetting. This is also software that has a long way to go. It's in python, and I found I was able to add things to it when it didn't have a feature I wanted, so by now it's pretty good for my purposes. One of the features I added was an ability to put lilypond directives as comments in the ABC, so I keep the ABC as the "source" form for my music.

You can see the final result of this process by looking at dowland.pdf , and the ABC sources are on my Music publishing page.

Re:MIDI and Lilypond

[darthpenguin]

There are many programs that do this. "Midisoft Studio" is a common example. You just connect a keyboard through the midi port, press the record button, then play, while it records the notes.

I'm sure there are many much more "professional" programs than midisoft, but I haven't really looked into any, as I don't actually have a midi keyboard to use it with.
-mdek.net

Find a Unicode editor

[The Unconquered One]

Personally I like Bell Lab's Plan 9 sam (Unix and Windows versions are avaiable) editor -- it handles Unicode text using a nifty ed-like command language. You'll need a Unicode editor, because according to the Unicode pipeline, several musical scripts are purposed for inclusion in Unicode:

• U+1D000..U+1D0F5 - Byzantine Musical Symbols
• U+1D100..U+1D1DD - Western Musical Symbols

The character set of the western musical symbols is available. Check if this is what you need.

FYI, other Unicode editors for Unix are available, e.g. yudit. Good luck!

Look into Ludwig van

[goingware]

I haven't seen it and the page says there's not much to it yet, but the author is apparently both a programmer and a pretty serious musician.

Check out Ludwig van on Advogato and also developer Cody Russel's page there.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

MusicTex?

[WhyteRabbyt]

Macro package for TeX...

Pax,

White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++

Music notation software...

[evil_one]

have you tried freshmeat? It's a pretty good resource.
---

MIDI and Lilypond

[SanLouBlues]

Somebody should be able to connect a MIDI controller and have it print music out. One could just jam and transcribe it at the same time. That would be ideal, but so would free beer.
Until then . . . .

Linux Sound & MIDI website

[gruppa]

Are you aware of the Linux Sound & MIDI site? (There is also a European mirror) It's the best collection of links to Linux music-related software and documentation I've found.

Here's their Music Notation page.