LilyPond
LilyPond is a music typesetter. It produces beautiful sheet music using a file as input. LilyPond is part of the GNU Project.
| Tags | printing Text Processing Markup multimedia Sound/Audio |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | Windows Windows POSIX |
| Implementation | C++ Scheme Python |
Recent releases
- 13 Nov 2006 07:38
Changes: A new page breaking algorithm will tune both horizontal and vertical spacing. Hence, page turns will only fall at rests or places that you mark explicitly. Internal rewrites were done that make it possible to output a much simpler intermediate format. In the long term, this will enable other programs to read LilyPond music. The release also includes support for falls and doits, dashed barlines, al niente hairpins, right hand fingerings for guitar, better formatting of tied chords, automatic beaming, and nested tuplets.
- 29 Mar 2006 05:23
Changes: The newest version adds three major typographical improvements. First, page layout has been improved with options to tune vertical spacing per system, to set the total number of systems, and to visualize page parameters. Second, algorithmic notation buffs will love the new exact proportional spacing, where mixed exotic rhythms and nested tuplets still produce mathematically consistent spacing. Third, the tied chord formatting was greatly improved, and each offending tie configuration can be overridden.
- 08 Dec 2005 02:42
Changes: Minor bugs were fixed, mostly in packaging.
- 27 Jun 2005 08:06
Changes: LilyPond now installs easily on Windows, MacOS X, and any version of Linux. Pango text formatting lets you print Unicode lyrics in your favorite script and font. It now also creates SVG files, which you can edit in Inkscape. In addition, there are many more small improvements.
- 30 Oct 2004 19:33
Changes: This version no longer relies on TeX to do titling and page layout, but distributes page breaks optimally to produce evenly spaced pages, while respecting user-specified turning points. The slur formatting code has been completely rewritten, and now yields classical engraving quality results for most cases. In addition, this version adds fret diagrams, a safe execution mode for Web server use, a further simplified input format, better typography for ledger lines, many bugfixes, and a fully revised and updated manual.
- All comments
Recent commentsserious craftsmanship
This is the kind of software project that takes some serious craftsmanship to create, and that's exactly what the authors have put into it. Bravo!
My only real complaint is that the language has not stayed very stable, so some input files on the Mutopia site will no longer compile. There is apparently a conversion script for backward compatibility, but it's not well advertised. It would be nice to know how much one can depend on the language to stay the some from now on.
Prospective users who don't want to learn to type in music using the Lilypond language may want to check out the Rosegarden project, which is a GUI front-end for Lilypond.