LilyPond is an automated music engraving system designed to produce high-quality printed musical scores. Instead of positioning notes through a graphical editor, musicians describe the composition using a text-based notation language.
The software processes the source file and automatically arranges notes, staves, symbols and other musical elements according to traditional engraving principles. This approach makes it particularly useful for preparing complex scores where consistent spacing and typography are important.
LilyPond can be used with any suitable text editor, although specialised applications such as Frescobaldi provide additional facilities for writing and previewing scores. Because the notation is stored as text, compositions can also be maintained using conventional version-control systems.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Automated engraving – produces professionally formatted musical scores from text-based notation.
- Intelligent spacing – automatically adjusts the placement of notes, rests, accidentals, beams and other elements.
- Page layout – manages line breaking, page breaking and staff positioning.
- Polyphonic notation – supports multiple voices, instruments and staves within a single composition.
- Orchestral parts – generates individual instrumental parts and full scores from shared source material.
- Complex notation – handles tuplets, articulations, dynamics, grace notes, ornaments and other symbols.
- Lyrics and chord symbols – adds vocal text, chord names and harmonic annotations.
- Specialised notation – supports guitar tablature, percussion, ancient notation and other musical forms.
- Customisable engraving – controls fonts, spacing, page dimensions and individual notation elements.
- Scheme extensibility – allows advanced customisation through embedded Scheme programming.
- MIDI output – generates MIDI playback files from compatible scores.
- Multiple output formats – produces PDF, SVG, PNG and PostScript documents.
- Document integration – inserts musical examples into larger documents using lilypond-book.
- Music font support – includes engraving fonts designed for conventional music typography.
Website: lilypond.org
Support:
Developer: LilyPond development team
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
LilyPond is written in C++ and Scheme. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn Scheme with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Open Source Scorewriters | |
|---|---|
| Rosegarden | Sophisticated MIDI (and audio) sequencer and notation editor |
| MuseScore Studio | Graphical WYSIWYG music score typesetter |
| Lilypond | Produce musical scores that are engraved with traditional layout rules |
| Frescobaldi | LilyPond sheet music text editor |
| Denemo | Musical score editor intended primarily as a frontend to Lilypond |
| music21 | Toolkit for computational musicology |
| mup | Very feature-laden application for producing printed music |
| TuxGuitar | Multitrack tablature editor and player writen in Java-SWT |
| Aria Maestosa | Midi sequencer/editor |
| Gregorio | Tools for Typesetting Gregorian Chant |
| Canorus | Graphical music score editor written for the Qt4 toolkit |
| PMW | Music typesetting program for creating high-quality scores |
| EasyABC | Graphical editor for creating and editing ABC music notation |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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