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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the 24-to-10-is-a-score-that-I-wrote dept.

LinuxLinks has a 12-section article on the various free and open source score writers available for composers and musicians.

Fortunately, there is a wide range of open source scorewriters which are supported in Linux. This article recommends cost-effective alternatives to Sibelius and Finale. The software featured here is released under freely distributable licenses, all are available to download at no charge, and generate music scores which are engraved with traditional layout rules.

This article does not limit itself to software with a graphical user interface. One of the benefits of using software which doesn't depend on a graphical interface is that you can create and edit music on any type of device, even small handheld devices.

Towards the bottom of the first page, there is a table of the score writers reviewed. Each is reviewed on a separate page. Follow the links there to the individual pages describing each one.

Source : 11 Excellent Free Scorewriters – Compose, arrange, print, and publish music


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:42PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:42PM (#636045) Journal

    So, as an idiot who doesn't know anything about music, how can it handle tremolo?

    See here [lilypond.org].

    how about 8:15 tuples?

    See here [lilypond.org]. Tuplets can be expressed as any fraction.

    Tremolo crescendi with staccato stop?

    I could easily make an example of this. But Lilypond usually does well when you pile a bunch of articulation marks up -- it has a lot of decent collision avoidance and spacing algorithms to deal with such scenarios. That doesn't mean you won't encounter some situations where it screws stuff up... obviously that happens.

    it's as half-baked as all other open-source shit is, it will erroneously transpose notes to random 8vas and 8vbs and thousand-deep ledger-lines.

    I've never seen those sorts of bugs in Lilypond, even when I first started using it over a decade ago. The text input makes a lot of these things a lot less likely, because you're explicitly telling the application the exact octave and location of every note.

    I have encountered such weirdness in other notation software, and not just open source. I used Finale extensively a couple decades ago, and even years after it was a "mature" piece of software (which cost several hundred dollars) and widely used, you'd encounter bizarre bugs all the time. I remember specifically one fun one: back in the day, Finale had rather short limits on some text boxes you could use for articulation markings or score instructions. So if you wanted to put "cresc. poco a poco" you might be able to fit that, but something longer might require you to create two separate text boxes and line them up manually on the score.

    Anyhow, I did that in one instance (i.e., two text boxes), but when I tried to move them together to make the spacing look right (which would always look different on the screen than when you printed it), it would shrink all of the staves on the page. Not the notes, mind you, but just the staves would compress and make everything look bizarre and crunched. When I moved the text boxes farther apart again, the notation righted itself. I moved the two text boxes back and forth several times, marveling at what bizarre code must underlie this software to create such a strange bug.

    A lot of that stuff has been ironed out in Finale over the years, but let's not pretend commercial software is immune to bizarre bugs -- and music notation software is notorious for weird problems like this. Lilypond is definitely quite mature and random bugs are rare. If I remember correctly, they have an extensive list of weird notation situations they run every new version through to check and ensure bizarre stuff doesn't happen when they tweak the code.

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