Mutopiaproject and LilyPond are great. I used Mutopiaproject a lot when I was a teenager who enjoyed playing piano. It and imslp changed how I explored music, and helped me develop my interests. I always preferred the LilyPond scores from Mutopiaproject when they were avaialable, because they were usually higher quality. I actually decided to give back to the community by typesetting some scores myself.
They are working to typeset out of copyright works using GNU LilyPond. The scores are particularly beautifully typeset and very easy to read when printed.
LilyPond is surprisingly good at producing high quality scores. I was surprised to learn recently that many people export from other music editors (e.g., Musescore) to LilyPond to compile the final output.
Lilypond helped me learn a lot of music theory I had missed in my learning to play piano; I use it to transcribe music now and it’s a fantastic piece of software (with fantastic docs!)
I too contribute monthly to Petrucci. Apart from downloading the scores of piano pieces I want to play (they offer a wide set of arrangements for all but the most obscure pieces), I have discovered several hidden gem in their library, which grows more and more every time I check!
Before Petrucci, I used to be a regular user/contributor of the Mutopia project [1]. Its purpose is to provide Lilypond [2] source files for scores: this allows users to create MIDI files or re-create PDF files using custom page layouts/line breaks/etc. These features are handy, but creating a Lilypond file from a score is much more time-consuming than simply scanning it and uploading to Petrucci. (Each of Mozart's and Haydn's string quartet I uploaded took me ~2 weeks of work.)
Lilypond is freaking awesome. As a hobbyist with a music degree but unrelated career, I switched a while back, and it's saved me multiple times over just because of backwards compatibility and free software. My old version of Sibelius doesn't run on newer hardware, so some old scores I never ported are lost if I don't spend money just to export. But my old lilypond scores will always be fine.
I find the choice of MuseScore and it's somewhat proprietary XML-based format an odd choice for "open" though. For example, I tried to open these scores using the MuseScore binary that comes with the latest ubuntu, and it was unable to open the files due to the fact that they're written using the pre-release 2.0 version of MuseScore.
Personally, I find LilyPond (http://lilypond.org/) a much better choice for these sorts of "open score" type projects. It's editable without a GUI, and produces best-of-class output. Think of MuseScore as "a drawing program for musical scores" and LilyPond as "a language for expressing scores in a human-readable, generic form"
The Mutopia Project (http://www.mutopiaproject.org/) has been hosting and re-engraving public domain scores for a very long time. All the source code including scores is on github via https://github.com/MutopiaProject/MutopiaProject Although MuseScore has a prettier UI, Mutopia and IMSLP have much larger and comprehensive collections.
Anyway, Kudos certainly to the recording and performers, they're great, and I look forward to score engravings that don't rely on the MuseScore software.
My wife is also a musician and music teacher, but I have not been able to persuade her to tackle Lilypond. (I have occasionally done projects in Lilypond for her, and the results are great, but the barrier to entry is too high for her to scale.)
What she has found much more approachable is MuseScore (https://musescore.org/). I haven't done a careful comparison of the output to see which scores better [sorry!], but it's certainly adequate for her everyday needs, and with a cheap midi keyboard as input device, it was remarkably easy to get started.
ABC is the other major player in the space besides MusicXML and Lilypond.
The Mutopia project [1] is magnificent but largely abandoned in favor of MuseScore [2] which uses MusicXML. The amount of music available there is staggering but locked in to their backend.
Unfortunately automated translation is difficult because Lilypond is very oriented towards specifics on how the notation is rendered.
And, if you are interested in general archives of music, IMSLP [3] (Internet Music Score Library Project) has to be mentioned as well, but mostly contains scans of existing engraved music.
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.
I assume you mean Lilypond. It's great, but the interop with MusicXML format (the closest thing to a standard when it comes to machine-readable sheet music - and also supported by MuseScore) could use some improvement.
For those that are not afraid of using a DSL to generate scores, Lilypond is great.
Much like using graphviz to generate workflows, you can just hop in an editor and start typing out your score, creating reusable chunks along the way. There is also a decent live-reload style editor called Frescobaldi.
I love lilypond. My son plays the piano now and I make simplified arrangements of songs for him. He can pick out songs by ear and I'm teaching him to hand annotate first, because I don't know a better way to encourage familiarity with the notation, but I'll get him set up with lilypond eventually.
There are various nicer IDEs for it, but I just run side-by-side windows with zathura and emacs; zathura will automatically reload when PDFs change on disk so I can see my changes immediately.
I can tell you that as a programmer with a music background, lilypond has been a godsend. As programming is my day job, many of my notation projects are long-term things that won't get touched for weeks. I have a backlog of 40-50 piano improvisations I want to notate, plus some pop/jazz originals for which I write various different versions of arrangements / lead sheets, not to mention a collection of altered lead sheets for my jazz group. And much older classical compositions from college, and a full-orchestra film score I did once.
With my git repo, I can see diffs over time, I can "compile" different versions of the scores, and by far and away most important, I have long term backwards compatibility. It was just last month I realized I missed porting an old flute duet from Sibelius to Lilypond, and I could no longer open Sibelius due to my version not running on my hardware anymore. Putting me in the position of having to buy an upgrade just to see it. Luckily I found one exported pdf, and that was enough. Now it's in Lilypond and I'm safe.
Have never come across LilyPond before (for that matter I haven't used any software in that area since Sibelius about 5 years ago), but that looks amazing. Thanks for linking to the essay, most interesting thing I've read in a while!
reply