Philip’s Music Writer (PMW) is a command-line music typesetting program that produces high-quality printed scores from text-based notation. Musicians describe their music using a compact input language, which PMW processes into PDF, PostScript or Encapsulated PostScript output.
Unlike graphical notation editors, PMW separates the creation of musical content from its visual presentation. Input files can be prepared in any text editor, making the program particularly suitable for users who prefer precise, reproducible control over how their music is engraved.
PMW caters for complex orchestral, instrumental and vocal scores. Its extensive notation facilities and flexible formatting controls make it useful for composers, arrangers and music publishers preparing professional-looking sheet music.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Supports common musical notation, including microtonal accidentals and up to 63 staves per system.
- Extract individual instrumental parts or selected groups of parts from a complete score.
- Transposition of notes, key signatures and chord names.
- Automatic checking of bar lengths against time signatures, with manual overrides.
- Automatic allocation of bars to systems and systems to pages.
- Custom page dimensions, margins, magnification, line breaks and page breaks.
- Independent control of stave sizes, spacing and positioning.
- Multiple notehead styles, clefs, barlines, repeat markings and stave configurations.
- Automatic consolidation of consecutive empty bars into multi-bar rests.
- Configurable bar numbering and cautionary time and key signatures.
- Macros, included files and facilities for repeating notes, bars and arbitrary musical passages.
- Conditional sections for managing differences between complete scores and individual parts.
- Limited support for right-to-left music layout.
- Cross-platform support – runs on Linux and macOS.
Website: github.com/PhilipHazel/pmw
Support:
Developer: Philip Hazel
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
PMW is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Open Source Scorewriters | |
|---|---|
| Rosegarden | Sophisticated MIDI (and audio) sequencer and notation editor |
| Musescore | 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 |
| Impro-Visor | Educational program designed to help musicians compose and hear solos |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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