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I am wondering if anyone here has given this engraving programme a try.

http://www.lilypond.org/introduction.html


M.

And here is an essay about it . . . maybe with some experience eventually one can get very high quality results with less effort than must be used with other programmes. I am wondering if anyone here has given it a try and found this to be true.

http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/big-page

M.

Lilypond is fabulous and great IF you can commit to working as it requires you to, which means programming (coding). If you like that approach, or if you try it and and find you like it, you may never ever go back to other notation programs. It's not that it's better - it's just a different way to do things and if you prefer a different approach, well, Lilypond might be that different approach for you.

If Lilypond interests you you might also want to take a look at things like SuperCollider, Pure Data, Max/MSP/Jitter, and Processing. They're not notation programs but they're all programming language (and environments) that connect to music and sound.

If you already know how to program you're a step ahead in the Lilypond learning curve. You can use any programming language you're familiar with to write scores in Lilypond format.

It's also worth taking a look at MuseScore (another open-source notation program that works like traditional notation editors ... Finale, Sibelius, etc.) MuseScore, I think, has the ability to export scores into Lilypond format. So that can be a helpful tool too ...

Hope this helps.

It seems to be possible in a small number of steps to have LilyPond recompile a Finale entered score:

http://www.alexyoder.net/code/?p=28

M.

I've been using Lilypond for about a year and a half. I've quite satisfied with it, but I have a programming background (including typesetting using TeX). Lilypond is not as complicated as programming, but it probably isn't for everyone. There may be some graphical front ends to it. I haven't tried Finale or other commercial software, so am unable to compare.

I did try an older version of MuseScore, but found it a bit quirky. The results were not near the quality of Lilypond.

I also tried Rosegarden, which integrates with Lilypond, to capture and score via MIDI. I had some initial difficulties and didn't pursue it far enough to form a fair opinion.

stumbler,

you've summed it up pretty well i think. w/a programming background or an interest in coding lilypond's fairly easy to use and mostly very nice looking in terms of output.

i've often seen that musicians who come to lilypond with no prior programming experience or knowledge of coding see it as being hopelessly useless! exactly because there's no gui and no point and click. it really just comes down to how one likes to work (with the austerity of text or the images in a gui)

another way to describe the "lilypond vs other notations programs" difference is lilypond is for engraving in the same way TEX is for formatting. finale and all others, musescore too, are general notation programs - with pointing and clicking they produce excellent output. but they do a lot of other things too.

i mostly use musescore now. only because it's free, it's fast, and the scores that come out are plenty readable. i'm pretty sure there's an "export to lilypond" option in musescore.

it's possible there are musicXML parsers out there that convert from that format (musicXML) to lilypond. if so, anything that can output musicXML (finale, sibelius, musescore, and others) could be converted to lilypond.

Thanks for all the responses!

M.

Looks interesting and not too complicated. I really want to give it a try.

Cool. Looks like a good tool to have in the tool box.
Also looks a lot like the music equivalent of TeX or LaTeX.
Thanks for posting about LilyPond.