What is Reddit's opinion of LilyPond?

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Well if you're looking for a traditional, relatively easy to use music notation software, Musescore is the standard and I don't know of any other serious free software.

However, if by "best" you mean a software that produces the best-looking scores, Lilypond seems better suited to your needs. It is unconventional in that what you do is write a text file and then compile it to a score (if you've heard of LaTeX, this is the same, but for scores). They claim it's not that hard to use and compares well with famous non-free software. Also note that Musescore can export scores as Lilypond text files.

Look into LilyPond; easy to understand notation, installs on Linux, tons of features, and can be executed via PHP.

I've used it for a music library project built in CodeIgniter.

If you're of the hacker mindset, with more brainpower than money, and you don't mind investing a lot of time learning an arbitrary language, then LilyPond is absolutely amazing at score engraving.

Lilypond is free and produces MIDI. It does not use a graphical interface like Musescore (and Finale and Sibelius, etc) but instead you create a text file which is then compiled into a pdf.

One nice thing about this approach is that it tends to produce better-looking sheet music without as much (if any) tweaking needed for the final score. It really is beautiful and if that's what counts the most to you then it's an excellent fit.

Lilypond is a mature product with active development and a very helpful community.

Apparently the learning curve is steeper than with most other programs but if you read the tutorial and/or use a front-end editor like Frescobaldi then it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out.

I typically do it on a case by case basis depending on the mode. For some things I even use dodecaphonic rules (every accidental displayed). For others I will try to find the best voice leading in the individual parts (F# G Ab instead of Gb G G#) and yet others will be the best spelling of chords.

Also, see the section on automatic accidentals here: http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation-big-page.html

So there is an older but more supported alternative to this called lilypond http://www.lilypond.org/ it does typesetting and can generate midi.

if your in to this I'd recommend checking it out.

There are even ide's for it. Frescobaldi is my favorite :)

You can try, but usually that won't work - unforunately not wanting to pay for software doesn't grant you the right to an unlimited trial, and distributors take careful steps to stop that kind of "technically legal" skirting around buying a license.

If you can't afford Sibelius, maybe look into some free alternatives, like MuseScore or LilyPond.

I recommend LilyPond. I think it makes it pretty easy to type up music. If you don't add a duration to each note (like if you want to figure out the rhythm later), each note just gets the duration of the last note which had a specified duration (e.g. "e4 d c d e e e r" is the first line of "Mary had a little lamb," where the "4" makes them quarter notes). You can easily stick notes and rests in between other notes or remove notes and simply recompile to see the new music. If the durations of notes don't fit the measures properly, the output may look a little wonky, but it will still usually compile. It can produce midi files as well as sheet music.

I'm pretty sure you can do that with lilypond. You can definitely have functions (they are called fragments or subroutines or something) then after them by changing key or octave. It's pretty cool. And they have ide's for it. http://www.lilypond.org/

Here is the section in the manual. That should be all the differences (note names and accidentals).

There's Lilypond, which is both free as in beer and as in speech. It's not the easiest thing to use though, it's essentially a markup language for writing sheet music, but it can produce beautiful results.

> computer-printed sheet music

For completeness' sake: The way to typeset music is lilypond. The TeX of music. Whatever your sequencer or whatever generates natively is generally about as aesthetically pleasing as a page of monospaced text.

Check out Lilypond. It's completely free, and many argue produces better looking scores than Sibelius and Finale. There is a learning curve to the input as it's code based, but once you get going it's actually faster (for many people).

I don't use playback any more 95% of the time. I sing the lines along the way until they are ingrained and by that point there isn't any reason. Playback also gives a very distorted image of what some instruments sound like. I would argue that it gets in the way just as much as it helps. I'd encourage people to bring sketches to an instrumentalist early in the composing process. That way you can lock yourself into the sound of real playing.

In general, things like pencil/paper and lily pond are so good because they encourage (demand) internal hearing. They put more of the burden on your brain, which causes you to become better at internally hearing notes, chords, rhythms, timbres, textures, etc.

All of this is with the disclaimer that everybody is different. IMHO, however you make music is fine so long as you enjoy it.

The best free or non free music notation software available is Lilypond. It differs from most other programs in that you create a file using a markup language (like you do in HTML or using Reddit's markup) and then the software compiles that into a score.

The learning curve significant but like anything, once you get used to it you'll find that it's easy to create new scores.

One of the huge pluses is that you often do not need to tweak the output at all (cf Finale, Sibelius, Musescore, etc). When you do need to tweak the output it can be a bit tricky but the tools are there.

There's a very robust community for it that is very helpful and will often take the time to create some special feature for you if needed.

Because you're dealing with a text file for your score then version control (eg: git) is a breeze. This is especially good for collaborative works.

Finally, it's not only free but it is open source and available on many platforms.

You might consider Lilypond. You'd have to transcribe it into Lilypond, which means learning how to do that. Lilypond can produce the same sheet of music and a midi file. Lilypond is fantastic. It will render any musical notation. I use it all the time.

I dig it. I like the sparseness and combining the simple piano sound with a "simple" electronic/percussive effect works nicely. At times the piano music almost became too interesting with the multiple notes and little rhythmic flourishes.

As for producing a score from the MIDI file, Lilypond can do it for you. It's free and produces terrific-looking scores. It comes with a tool called "midi2ly" which takes a MIDI file and converts it to a Lilypond file which can then be run through Lilypond producing a pdf file. Based on what I heard there's going to be a lot of very weird durations because even though midi2ly does provide some quantization it might not be that good. If you become familiar with Lilypond then you would be able to modify the Lilypond file and make it look nicer otherwise consider what it produces to be a draft.

I think you could get by with a coda, but I remember the coda nearly always being a sort of ending section.

Numbered repeat bars seem like they might fit what you're looking for, but I'm admittedly not sure how they'd mesh with all the other repeat bars you've got going on up there.

EDIT: Visual reference.

You can make them yourself. Exactly what programs to use, I don't have too many suggestions. The first is lilypond. You could try Audacity and see if you could conjure up some magic from that. There's also muse. You could also torrent finale, or sibelius (or get them, but that's only if you actually want to compose music).

This sounds really great. I don't have any parts to contribute, but I can contribute engraving skills if you want to embark on something like this. I'm pretty versed in LilyPond (http://www.lilypond.org/) which can produce some pretty nice looking scores.

If you're willing to deal with text input, also try ABC and Lilypond. I can work very fast in ABC. Lilypond is similar, has more capability, but also has a bigger learning curve.

Well, I have 2.14.1 installed, so it took some fiddling. You have a missing measure bar at line 239. Line 240 has a ~ out of place. It also didn't like the override on the breathing sign, so I just commented that out. I'm also not sure what's going on with your nested repeats (measures 30-44 and 31-43), that's not something you often see, musically, and you don't have a second ending, so I'm guessing something's not intentional there.

Anyway, here's what you need to know about D.C. al Coda. Their example (true to Lilypond documentation) is overly complicated.

Here's what I did (I hope I'm interpreting your intentions correctly), starting at line 171

<>^\markup { "D.C. al Coda" } <c e>4 r4 r2 \bar"||"| \break e4\coda c4 r2|

Basically, it inserts the text, puts in a break so the coda starts on a new line, and then starts the coda.

Sorry if this is WAY outside your topic but if you're curious, you can get a Moto E https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones/moto-e-2nd-gen/moto-e-2nd-gen.html with LTE for $150. Then you can get the T-Mobile sim from Walmart for $10 and you get 4 gigs of data on LTE for $32.~~ per month or some such including taxes.

I just figured I would mention a phone because I use mine to record ideas often. Sometimes I also write things out in lilypond notation.

Capturing is the first step of creativity. It's definitely an important thing to do, no matter how you do it.

> It's hard to improve on them since they're both such excellent tools.

I don't know about Sibelius, but WRT Finale, the Lilypond authors have an essay comparing the typographic output of Finale to the output of Lilypond that's worth a read.

Did you try out LilyPond? It's the LaTeX of music :) You enter everything as text, and compile it as a partition. Instead of wasting time to figure out how to present things, you just tell LilyPond what you want it to write. There are also numerous GUIs to use it and it's opensource.

Depending on how much work you're willing to put in, Lilypond creates some really great usable snippets. There's a massive learning curve involved compared to normal notation programs (it's basically a programming language more than a program), but if this is something you're going to be doing a lot of, it might be worth it to take a couple days to learn it.

I really like the Mutopia Project. It doesn't have the widest range of piano sheet music, but there's still most of the classics and the formatting is pretty good (It's done with lilypond).

You could use Lilypond as a user-readable format, and write a parser which turns that into whatever form you want for the player. It's pretty simple to write (the tutorial is here), and you then have the advantage of the user being able to use already-existing scores and programs like Rosegarden to write their things in. The biggest problem is that you then have to write the glue program which turns it from Lilypond to your format.

There's a bit of a learning curve, but IMHO Lilypond does some of the nicest output I've seen.

You can either enter the notation in their markup language, or use one of the GUI editors that have been developed to work with it.