Lilypond

[kliewe]

Has anyone here used Lilypond to print piano music?  I just discovered the Mustopia site the other day and the scores look very good -- much better than the photocopied stuff you see at imslp for example.

But using Lilypond seems like a lot of work, and I get the feeling that not a lot of people use it.  Is it worth learning?

[g_s_223]

Some years ago I tried out a variety of open source music notation packages, and none of them were really satisfactory for a variety of reasons. A lot depends on the complexity of the notation you would wish to set, e.g. baroque music is relatively simple to notate while contemporary music often uses very sophisticated graphics.

I ended up with Finale, which I found pretty good, although quite expensive initially.

[zezhyrule]

One day I will learn it. There's a nice WYSIWYG editor for it named Frescobaldi but I'd probably end up using vim myself. If I ever learned enough about LilyPond to use it.

Sadly for now I'm stuck with MuseScore. It's good enough for my needs. I don't care about free vs. proprietary software myself, but Finale (which I'd prefer) simply isn't available for Linux. It's my goal to learn LilyPond though, and then maybe I'll never have to pay an insane amount of money for a Finale license. I love $600 software. Speaking of which, LMMS > FL Studio.

Edit: Found a neat article comparing Finale to LilyPond.

[zezhyrule]

Some years ago I tried out a variety of open source music notation packages, and none of them were really satisfactory for a variety of reasons. A lot depends on the complexity of the notation you would wish to set, e.g. baroque music is relatively simple to notate while contemporary music often uses very sophisticated graphics.

https://lilypond.org/web/switch/new-notation



That's hardly unsophisticated.

[j_menz]

That's hardly unsophisticated.

Apparently "sophisticated" is now synonymous with "just plain nuts".