Murray,

John in Brisbane has been working hard to update our information on ABC notation and supporting software in the thread and that started me following up on related music notation software. I remembered that you had called our attention to LilyPond and figured I'd look in on that as well.

LilyPond has been picked up by the GNU project and is now known as GNU LilyPond. It is well supported and in active development. The nice part is the installation scripts. If one chooses to install GNU LilyPond the installation scripts automatically install Cygwin from RedHat along with TeX, MusicTex, and everything needed to use LilyPond. The installation is polite enough not to ask musicians a bunch of technical questions, it just takes care of things. It is a big install though (686 MB) so I wouldn't recommend it over a dialup connection.

Cygwin basically adds a UNIX OS on top of the Windows kernel. This provides a UNIX environment for TeX, LaTeX, MusicTex and LilyPond. The user doesn't need to know UNIX to use LilyPond but Cygwin provides the POSIX layer and the related tools that LilyPond uses in the background.

LilyPond includes a program called abc2ly that converts ABC notation to LilyPond notation. Both are simply ASCII text files but the LilyPond notation provides everything from a simple lead sheet to a full orchestral score. Even if the user would rather stick with ABC for most purposes, LilyPond provides the ability to create beautiful music publications without having to reenter the notation.

GNU LilyPond includes most of the beautification nuances you'd expect to find in Finale or other expensive high-end products. Available features include:

• Polyphonic parts on a single staff
• As many staffs as are required for ensemble notation
• Specifying chords either by name or by spelling
• Guitar tablature either by itself or combined with standard notation
• The ability to create tablature for other instruments such as mandolin or banjo specifying the number of strings and the tuning
• The ability to create PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files directly from the input without needing any software from Adobe
• The ability to add specialized textual notation above the staff and still have it logically related to specific notes or chords
• The ability to generate a MIDI file from the notation for performing an “ear check” of the completed score.
• The ability to include lyrics and have them properly tied to the music
• The ability to include several verses of a song within a grand staff in the manner common in hymnals

GNU LilyPond is a music publishing program, not a sequencing or sound editing program and I'm not sure that it will convert a MIDI file to LilyPond notation. Still, it seems a lot easier to use than either MusicTeX or Finale and the price is certainly right. There is even a growing library of classical scores available for download in LilyPond notation. For anyone wanting to publish or print music for distribution, GNU LilyPond seems like a viable option.

      - Mark