#Lilypond music pdf#
#Lilypond music software#

Then compile the PDF with LilyPond, which can then be converted to an image, which you can easily include in a document or presentation. With LilyPond, you can write a small snippet of code, like this: MuseScore, by comparison, expects to be used for an entire work, a whole song. In my opinion, one functional advantage of LilyPond over MuseScore, which I have used in the past, is that it can be used even for a small snippet of music. It's incredibly feature-rich, and every bit of it is thorougly documented with examples. The system also has engraving tools for shape-note music, guitar tabulature, drum compositions, Gregorian chants, and many more. In this case, I kept default behaviors everywhere, and things just worked. For instance, I could have shifted the dynamic 'ppp' or 'molto espressivo' to the right or left, or above or even below the staves, with fairly simple formatting commands. You can exercise very fine control over the placement of elements on the score. I spent that hour surfing around the outstanding online documentation, figuring out the formatting commands I would need to make things lay out the way I wanted them, and here's the output, a small choral piece: That said, in about an hour, I converted a small sample score that I did some years ago with MuseScore into LilyPond, and the output results were really impressive. If you want to test just LilyPond, you're going to be hand-hacking a text file that, frankly, is a little bit arcane. A number of music-scoring programs can generate LilyPond input files, but the focus of the project is and always has been on the output, the final score. LilyPond does not come equipped with a GUI. Downloading and installing LilyPond is super easy.

Version 2.19.36 was released at the end of January, but 2.18 is still considered the stable version. The desire for 'beautiful' music is what drives the community of people who still work on LilyPond, even after more than a decade.

#Lilypond music software#

The software is part of the GNU Project and is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The authors originally developed LilyPond because they felt that computer-generated scores were, to their eyes, 'soulless.' They designed LilyPond to follow the traditions laid down in older engraved scores. LilyPond is a free, mature music-typesetting program, similar in flavor to LaTeX.