Open source typesetter for sheet music | Hacker News Reader

Open source typesetter for sheet music

lilypond.org

49 pointssublemonic23 comments

I think this was one of the better writeups about Lilypond's commitment to good music typography I've read: http://lilypond.org/about/automated-engraving/big-page

That essay is a very nice rundown on the types of problems lilypond has dealt with in terms of working out how to create beautiful sheet music.

Yes, it's a very instructive essay.

However, notice that they only claim that Lilypond's default output tends to be better than other software's. It's not always as good as a good manual engraving. You have to tweak it to get it right.

Just today I printed this Tchaikovsky piece. Compare the manual engraving with a Lilypond output here (1st and 3rd links):

http://imslp.org/wiki/Dumka,_Op.59_(Tchaikovsky,_Pyotr_Ilyic...

In particular, look at the the Poco meno mosso section at pages 6 and 5, respectively. While the original has 2 bars in one line, the Lilypond version has 3. Not only the notes look too small, but the 8va in the second bar is almost unreadable.

But, alas, I cannot play it anyway.

Lilypond is neat. I'm using its output (and a buncha tools I built around it) in my iPhone app launching Tuesday: http://wonderwarp.com/etude

Wow, that's really neat. Do you have to hand typeset everything in its library, or are you mining some online set of lilypond files, or what?

I've mined Mutopia for the majority of music, but there are maybe 30 songs I've done by hand just because they were obvious holes in the selection. I'm a little unsure about offering CC-licensed stuff in the app, but my Etude-converted songs are also offered under CC and I'm going to be linking to the licenses, so I think it should be fine.

I'm going to try to write a post to show HN about the tech behind it. I wrote my own .ly parser/preprocessor in Python as part of the song conversion. To help the forked version of Lilypond correlate the screen position and time offset of notes in the piece, I ended up having it do things like unroll macros and loops and do all the layout changes I needed to make em work in the app.

That looks awesome. I don't use a device that runs iPhone OS, but it's a brilliant idea and looks beautiful.

As a side note: I'm a huge fan of Shovebox. I use quick jot at least once an hour.

As a nice bonus, Lilypond is also usable via a graphical interface, Denemo [1]. I've never used Sibelius or Finale so I can't comment on how they compare.

What I really wish were available, however, is the IMSLP catalog [2] in digital form (not PDF scans). Is there an app out there to OCR sheet music?

[1] http://www.denemo.org/index.php/Main_Page

[2] http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page

MuseScore can also export to LilyPond.

Oh great find for the sheet music archive! I'll now be drowning is music thanks!

Mutopia's got what you want:

http://www.mutopiaproject.org/

Of course the catalog is only a fraction of IMSLP's (typesetting is much harder than scanning).

Lilypond is the music equivalent of TeX. The thought put into how the final result looks is amazing.

Out of interest, have you seen MusiXTeX?

It's been a long time, but yeah. I just checked it out again. To my eye, the output does not look nearly as good -- it's basically on par with the music authoring software I was trying to use in the late 90s...which is not really that great. Sure it gets notes on a page, but is it readable?

To be fair, TeX is not really intended for musical notation, so it's cool they managed to get that kind of output. But Lilypond is really designed to produce beautiful, readable scores.

I remember, in a previous life as a violinist, that certain scores were just really hard to read, or not beautiful, it really killed my motivation to play them. Even familiar favorites, if engraved poorly were just no fun to read off of inferior pages.

Lilypond is nice, but its input language is (very powerful but) a bit clumsy and verbose. Others who feel the same way might want to take a look at PMW (http://www.quercite.com/pmw.html) which also produces high-quality PostScript output and has a more friendly syntax. Its author, Philip Hazel, is better known for the Exim mail transfer agent and the PCRE regexp library.

A program with such visual output could really benefit from a gallery page on its website. I found some examples of which it is capable of on http://lilypond.org/switch/tour

Yeah, lilypond is awesome. I actually used it to typeset a piece of music that got published as an arrangement for handbells! http://www.beckenhorstpress.com/title.asp?id=HB317

[edit] link to recording: http://www.beckenhorstpress.com/audio/HB317.mp3

Bonus points if you can name the actual piece (the publisher didn't want me to use the actual title for the published arrangement).

The music is Enigma Variations: Nimrod by Edward Elgar. The Oscillation on the bells and mp3 compression made it a bit hard at first : )

Yep, you got it!

And tweakable via Scheme to boot!

http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.12/Documentation/user/lilypond/In...

boo, gpl. lgpl would be fine

Apparently the developers felt that the LGPL wouldn't be fine, given that they GPL'd it.

Actually, most likely they thought it would have been fine. Just not as fine.

While I personally believe the GPL to be a poor license (in fact, I don't consider it to be pro-freedom in the least), criticizing others' license choices is just obnoxious. If you dislike it, don't use the software. If you really don't like it, compete with them.

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