[HN Gopher] LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
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LilyPond: Music notation for everyone
Author : tosh
Score : 57 points
Date : 2024-02-22 10:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lilypond.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lilypond.org)
| coreyp_1 wrote:
| Lily pond is great! I used it to be able to script the creation
| of musical examples to be put on PowerPoint slides and
| instructional videos. With a little bit of tinkering, you can get
| Lily pond output as an SVG to play nicely with Manim, and get
| some really interesting computational animations.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _"Compiling" Music_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30625450 - March 2022 (44
| comments)
|
| _Lyp - The Lilypond Swiss Army Knife_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13259590 - Dec 2016 (7
| comments)
|
| _Obsessed with putting ink on paper or What 's wrong with
| computer music notation?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262 - July 2010 (36
| comments)
|
| _Open source typesetter for sheet music_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1192289 - March 2010 (23
| comments)
|
| _LilyPond architecture (music notation software in Lisp)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379234 - Nov 2008 (2
| comments)
| croisillon wrote:
| looks like this task could somehow be automated ;)
| tylershuster wrote:
| I've also used VexFlow to good effect producing web-friendly
| music notation. Given I've had to invent my own syntax for
| producing pieces with any rapidity, but it seems less complicated
| than this.
| megmogandog wrote:
| I tried to learn LilyPond once but it was a bit too arcane for my
| taste. Now I use MuseScore, WYSIWYG notation program which is a
| lot more intuitive (and, like LilyPond, also released under the
| GPL).
|
| I write relatively simple music, though, mostly lead sheets. I
| always imagined LilyPond would shine in more complex scoring
| situations.
| RogerL wrote:
| LilyPond rules when you want to manipulate music
| algorithmically. Like make a music reading training app that
| creates examples based on your performance so far.
| bitbckt wrote:
| I only use LilyPond for engraving, and MuseScore for input.
| They complement each other that way as a free software
| replacement for the usual commercial options.
| yashrk wrote:
| LilyPond is the best way to integrate sheet music into the text-
| only formats (Markdown, wiki markups, org-mode). MediaWiki
| supports LilyPond. Emacs org-mode supports LilyPond. In fact
| LilyPond is way more simple to make small score snippets than any
| WYSIWYG score editor.
| organsnyder wrote:
| A while back I built a music publishing company (long defunct)
| and used LilyPond to engrave all of our scores. I received
| comments from quite a few established composers that the
| engraving was the best they'd seen from any publisher.
|
| I ended up with a collection of macros I used for common tasks.
| Probably the most-used was a macro that manually overrode the
| positioning of an element to be more visually pleasing or less
| confusing. Of course, it could be argued that the need for this
| indicates a deficiency of the engraving engine (and this was
| sometimes the case), but a manual final pass makes the difference
| between functional and professional-looking results. LilyPond's
| markup language made this easy.
|
| LilyPond's test suite taught me the value of comprehensive test-
| driven development: every bug starts as an addition to the test
| suite, and a visual diff--including a numerical value indicating
| the amount of change--is taken of the entire suite in between
| versions. In this way, regressions are quickly identified.
| o11c wrote:
| The problem with lilypond is that it's a write-only language. Due
| to so many macros, it can't be parsed, only executed.
|
| So its main value to me is as an intermediate output format.
| Because its output _is_ amazing.
|
| (to me, an ideal music representation should be 2-dimensional,
| consisting of multiple parallel data and markup channels, then
| each rendering should be able to select a subset)
| echoangle wrote:
| Interesting that Music notation even seems to be a "challenge" to
| do with a computer, speaking as a complete layman. It seems like
| there is only a few note symbols to draw, at fixed positions. Can
| someone explain what makes good engraving good?
| Kye wrote:
| Western notation is a complex written language developed over
| centuries. It's easy to render the symbols in isolation, but
| not the meaning they convey to the musician who's expected to
| perform it. Even something like whether to render a flat or a
| sharp depends on context and intended use.
| exabrial wrote:
| ^ This is "the problem". A lot of music students try to
| "solve" it after getting frustrated with the staff, but
| eventually decide that couple hundred years of bad notation
| still has most of the bugs worked out.
|
| You're really looking for patterns on the staff rather than
| the exact pedantic notes that are present in the notation.
|
| Me? Still learn best by ear. Unfortunately this is also the
| slowest method....
| bombcar wrote:
| https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.24/Documentation/essay.pdf is a
| really good explanation - simplistic "make music notes like
| characters in a font" gets you the information, but it is NOT
| at all beautiful and actively fights against you, the same way
| badly typeset and kerned text is hard to read.
| bitbckt wrote:
| The answer to that question has consumed books and university
| courses, but the LP essay linked in the sibling comment is a
| fine start.
| tecleandor wrote:
| Positions, orientation and spaced aren't fixed and can vary a
| lot. To get a bit of the detail involved on it you can check
| the videos for Musescore 3.6 engraving updates [0] or the
| "Overhaul" and "Notation" sections for the 4.0 update [1].
|
| Those aren't long, around 5 minutes each. 0:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLR40BGNy68 1:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc08RhOQDR4
| jraph wrote:
| As a matter of fact, I started learning LilyPond last weekend
| using Frescobaldi, because of its awesome midi input, and because
| I figured I might get more efficient with code than with a
| WYSIWYG editor (I use MuseScore).
|
| Frescobaldi is a very nice way of getting started. It generates
| code that you see, you can use buttons for features you don't
| know yet and then you can type code directly when you know it.
| Frescobaldi then remains useful for at least these reasons:
|
| - midi input and output
|
| - the rendered view and mapping between this view and the code
| when you click on stuff, quite like those latex IDEs
|
| - new feature discovery. I discovered the concept of the UI that
| shows you what code is generated and where recently with LuCI for
| OpenWrt, which shows what config file is going to be updated and
| how; I love it and Frescobaldi has the same quality. I find it
| lets you get started and then master a new complex system
| efficiently and painlessly.
|
| Of course I suspect I will reach for my usual text editor at some
| point... and maybe I need a midi input plugin for it (Kate, if
| anybody happens to know something about this)
|
| Of course storing repeated notes in variable is incredibly
| useful, and managing different voices on the same clef is
| surprisingly easier than with MuseScore.
|
| One thing I dislike is how stuff applying to several notes need
| to be "opened" _after_ the first note. I needed to do such a
| thing to a group of notes that was also used elsewhere and
| storing this group of notes in a variable was only natural but
| then it 's difficult to open something after the first note. But
| this is easily overcome by using an empty chord ( <> ) to start
| the grouping thing. Feels hacky but seems to work, I hope it
| doesn't have unintended consequences. I'm sure there's a very
| sensible reason for this that I will discover later and will make
| me think that it was an obvious design choice after all.
|
| I'm not sure it's for everyone though. MuseScore is better at
| this, LilyPond has started being for me at a time WYSIWYG started
| being frustrating and when I started wishing the UI didn't get in
| the way of my note input. But I'm used to code.
| max_ wrote:
| I have been having this Idea for a few years now. Why can't we
| just writ music like code.
|
| Executable & all.
| skull723 wrote:
| Then you might like 'faust' or 'pure data'.
| bombcar wrote:
| LilyPond Book combines LaTeX and LilyPond in a way that is
| actually quite capable and performant once you learn how it works
| - https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/usage/lilypond_...
|
| An 11 year old work still compiles just fine ...
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