This essay on LilyPond music notation software was discussed at a2b3 today. I read it just now and I'm just all amazed by it. Not just amazed that somebody tackled the issues of the popular music notation software out there, but also did it as open source! I had no idea such a thing existed!
I'm truly excited about this, not just as a computer geek but as a musician. Software like Finale and Sibelius are just insanely expensive. LilyPond does most everything that Finale does and even looks better. The drawback (which I don't even think is a huge deal being a computer geek) is that you don't have the GUI with LilyPond, entering notations is completely text based. When the file is saved it then saves a pdf which will have the nicely formatted notations available for your to print. Of course for me it would be like programming code and even the GUI on Finale isn't all that wonderful either so I could even prefer this.
Now a story...several years ago I performed in the orchestra for the musical Titanic. For whatever reason there were 3 flutes in the show and a real lack of flue music (3 flutes is highly unusual but it doesn't matter when you all get paid the same). Without going into a huge discussion of how musicals are scored, just know that the woodwind parts are pretty screwy. Each reed book can contain anywhere from 2-4 different instruments and trying to sort that all out can be a huge mess (the scoring makes sense for Broadway, not for community groups). There were several times when I didn't play long periods during the show so I decided to transpose a few of the clarinet parts (mostly to stave off the boredom). I downloaded Finale Notepad which is a free, but limited version of Finale. The program was so limited that I couldn't change time signatures or keys during the song file, I ended up using scissors, tape, and whiteout to actually make a readable piece of music out of the darn thing. What I would've have give to have known about this program then!
If you're a music type, this is worth checking out. I think the interface could take some time to get used to but I bet it wouldn't be hard with a little practice.
Hey Heidi. Cool that you found LilyPond. I've been using it for something like two years now and it's been incredibly useful. My last couple of scores are 100% Lily and I can't imagine going back to either Sibelius or Finale at this point. The interface (or the syntax, really) does take a bit to get used to, but you can describe some very, very specific stuff using the Lily input language. Hope you enjoy. And if you do put some stuff together in Lily maybe you could post a small snippet of the PDF.
Hi Trevor, I haven't been doing much with music in a long time, but I thought about how useful this would have been if I had been. Especially adding music directly into files, that would've made my senior thesis so much easier than cutting, pasting, and scanning the music into my paper. Maybe someday I'll get back into music more and I'll be able to play around with this.