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
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:54AM (4 children)
As someone who does a decent amount of music typesetting, Lilypond is definitely the best of the bunch. But you have to be willing to give up WYSIWYG. In doing so, you gain a lot of flexibility and power. And Lilypond's default spacing, design, and other typesetting choices are quite good. (Music notation really depends heavily on things like good spacing, good relative positioning of glyphs, etc. to promote readibility in real-time without errors.)
The problem is the learning curve to tweak notation in Lilypond outside the default typesetting algorithm can be quite steep. But for casual users who just want to get some notes on a page, it's great. And I find text input so much faster, convenient, and easy to manipulate than graphical (as in Finale or Sibelius).
Combine Lilypond with Frescobaldi to check graphical output in a GUI as you tweak the text input file if you want. Some GUI frontends for Lilypond exist, but never have as many features. And Lilypond works great with LaTeX if you want to combine musical examples with more complex text.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:27AM (2 children)
Musescore lets you enter notes with a keyboard of either type.
It does the typesetting. It lets you change things globally. It lets you override that for specific notes.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:11PM (1 child)
Lilypond has a number of front ends (including Frescobaldi) which allow entering pitches via MIDI keyboard, too.
So does Lilypond. Arguably Lilypond is mainly a typesetting engine.
There are hundreds -- probably thousands -- of global settings within Lilypond that you can alter, handling settings Musescore would never dream of altering.
In Lilypond, you have the "\override" syntax just for that, though Lilypond can override commands within any level of context (for a specific note, a specific series of notes, a specific voice, a specific staff, etc.).
To be clear, I have nothing against Musescore, which is a fine piece of software. For people doing basic music typesetting, either is likely fine. I'm not a Lilypond zealot. I suppose the reason I wrote my original post is because text input of music seems weird at first. I tried Lilypond twice and then quit it before I finally adopted it as my main method to typeset music. But over the years, I've realized it's significantly more flexible and powerful than other methods for input, once you're used to it.
If you want to argue that casual users will have a quicker "start up" with Musescore, I wouldn't disagree. But in terms of features, it's hard to find something with as many options as Lilypond.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:36PM
Lilypond + Frescobaldi is definitely more flexible than MuseScore, but MuseScore is getting closer. For my wife's use MuseScore was more than sufficient except that it was difficult to adjust the size of note-heads. (I could generally manage that, though not always, but she couldn't.) There was a period a few years ago when when would enter music into MuseScore, I'd convert it into Lilypond, and then I'd edit it in Frescobaldi until she approved of the layout.
OTOH, Lilypond + Frescobaldi was what I found ideal. it was the most flexible in every way. And the quickly regenerated PDF window showed the effects of the changes as you made them.
OTOH, was we were doing was direct composition, not playing into the score and then adjusting it. (I'm not any kind of musician, and my wife was definitely not a programmer.) So she would either enter notes in a GUI, or tell me note my note what to enter. If I played a midi instrument, I might well want to play in directly and then edit. And if my wife had, she might have. But she played largely flute and recorder, with occasional acoustic (not electric) piano. (She didn't like the feel of the keys on the electric pianos that she tried...and frequently didn't like the sound.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:33AM
If you know LilyPond and are looking to get involved with chiptunes, there's a music engine for Nintendo Entertainment System whose syntax [github.com] for musical phrases is heavily based on LilyPond. It's called Pently [github.com], and it can be used to make NSF files (stand-alone files that play in an emulator or in an audio player with an NSF plug-in) or as the audio driver of an NES ROM (if you're making a homebrew game).
Disclosure: I maintain Pently.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:00AM (7 children)
As someone with a bunch of formal musical education in composition, GNU Denemo and MuseScore both handle just about everything I need them to do, with less fuss than their paid counterparts like Finale. Even if I'm needing to do something weird, as I am sometimes wont to do.
Lilypond is handy, but I have to admit it's harder to mentally convert that to audio compared to WYSIWYG options. You get lots of training in music conservatories converting scores to sound and sound to scores in your head, but not so much from a sequence of letter names.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:14AM (4 children)
Agreed about the text input -- which is why I recommended combining Lilypond with Frescobaldi. The latter is basically a glorified text editor specifically to work with Lilypond, along with a graphical "preview" window, so you can see the notation you're creating and refresh whenever you want with a keystroke.
Personally, if I'm actually writing/composing/arranging music, I prefer to do that by hand with a pencil and paper at a keyboard -- I find composing within a notation program to be less intuitive (though I know many people do that now). So I'm using Lilypond mostly for typesetting existing music, not creating as I go (other than simple things).
(Score: 1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:38AM (3 children)
So, as an idiot who doesn't know anything about music, how can it handle tremolo? Tremolo crescendi with staccato stop? how about 8:15 tuples? If 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.
Please speak the details we can understand.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday February 10 2018, @08:31AM
Whomever modded that "troll" is a faggot, and only serves to shit up the discussion by making true musical nerds dodge that question.
Suck my dick.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:42PM
See here [lilypond.org].
See here [lilypond.org]. Tuplets can be expressed as any fraction.
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.
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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:19PM
LilyPond, MuseScore, and Denemo all support tremulo markings, both on beams and stems, and of course you can add crescendos, staccato, and other stuff wherever you like. Ditto for tuplets. Your claim that it can't is due to the fact that you came to your conclusion that the open source options were "half-baked" without Reading The Fine Manual for any of them, or even (gasp) downloading them and trying them out.
Hence, while I didn't give you the downmod, you deserved it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Saturday February 10 2018, @12:27PM
I think that Lilypond serves a different purpose. It's not a great tool for composing, but it is good for producing beautiful output. When I was a student, I was president of the university choir and used Lilypond to take a bunch of hand-scrawled bits of music that people had lying around and turn them into something that people could site-read without having to squint. The output was beautiful, but the process of transcribing was a little bit painful. It isn't something that you'd use unless you already have a composition and are preparing it for publication.
That said, I remember that there were a couple of MIDI to Lilypond converters that worked surprisingly well. The result needed a bunch of cleanup, but playing each part on a keyboard let you get the notes down quickly.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:40PM
I haven't used DeNemo in quite awhile, but I seem to recall that when I did I couldn't break lines where I wanted to. Unless that was the one that kept crashing. Once MuseScore started to allow me to adjust notehead sizes (or I figured out how to do so) I stopped trying to get the others to work, so this is probably a comment on a version three or four years ago.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 10 2018, @07:23AM (6 children)
OK, to read it, it must, by definition, be in written form. To understand it, a written form probably helps, but I'd be surprised if a musician could not understand most music when "merely" heard. The statement sounds to me like the claim that you cannot understand a text if spoken, only if written. While there exists texts where it is true, most texts can be quite well understood from hearing. I'd expect the same to be true of music.
And certainly some musicians can play music without scores. Written scores are not necessary to play music, just like written text is not necessary to tell a story. Sure, it helps, because otherwise you either have to memorize everything, or need the ability to fill in the missing parts on the spot. But necessary? I strongly doubt it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by requerdanos on Saturday February 10 2018, @03:40PM
I studied music theory, including sight reading from a musical score, but that was 40 years ago.
I play guitar, mostly by ear.
For people who play by ear, a score is interesting visually, perhaps, but not useful nor leading to being able to understand nor play music.
Sure, the tautology "to read [thing] it must be written" tenuously holds, with its exceptions, but the underlying implication that a composition must be written in order to be useful is just mistaken.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:25PM
I'd note the "and" here. You seem to interpret this sentence as claiming scores are required for any of the three activities. I see this sentence as talking about a set of related activities related by an "and" rather than an "or." That is, a composition that is written down can then be READ, as well as understood and played.
But let's not quibble; I agree the sentence is ambiguous. But the next sentence from TFA makes it clearer:
I'd argue (as you do) with "essential." But written communication certainly makes things easier and can be more efficient in many circumstances. If you are a manager trying to pass along essential information to your employees, and you want to make sure they understand the policies as you intend them, writing them down is probably a lot more effective than just announcing them orally and later trying to fix things when misunderstandings occur or memories fail.
On the other hand, traditional music notation tends to privilege certain elements with a lot of precision (specifically pitches and rhythm), but is much less specific on other elements (dynamics, articulations, timbre shifts, ornamentation, etc.). Often a lot of the "expressiveness" of music falls into those latter elements, so musical scores can only convey so much. For more popular styles, even pitch and rhythm notated in a traditional score is only a vague approximation to the subtle shifts skilled performers will do.
So scores are just a blueprint, but something that can help with efficient communication in many circumstances (assuming musicians who are fluent in reading).
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Saturday February 10 2018, @05:50PM (2 children)
It's true a lot of musicians can and do play without written scores. When that happens, what you get is a folk tradition as songs and tunes are passed around from musician to musician.
A couple interesting things happen as a result of this:
- The music each generation of musicians likes is remembered. The music that any 60-year period or so doesn't like is not. The upside of this is that it filters away a lot of the bad music. The downside of this is that you can have, as very nearly happened, the entirety of JS Bach's catalogue lost because everybody found it to be too old-school and unfashionable.
- Music evolves as musicians either mis-remember something and fill in the gaps, or intentionally make changes because they think the new version sounds better. This effect can be so strong that like a game of "Telephone" the music, words, and even titles completely change as it moves, say, from one corner of the British Isles to another. The upside of this is that like open-source software the music can improve over time as many minds make contributions. The downside of this is that you get many competing versions of each tune, and that can be a problem when you're trying to play with other people who may have a different version in mind than you do.
As an example of this in action, consider the silly little ditty "Miss Lucy Had a Steamboat", one of those few bits of folk culture still floating around that really behaves like folk music because there's no definitive recordings or written versions of it, just a bunch of different variations that have been passed around for about a century, mostly by children. Indeed, some of you probably think that I got the title of the song wrong, and that it's actually titled "Miss Suzie Had a Steamboat", which isn't surprising because "Miss Lucy" sounds like "Miss Suzie" if the "L" in "Lucy" isn't distinct.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Saturday February 10 2018, @11:22PM (1 child)
While I don't think I heard it in school, when I looked it up I found that for most of the song's existence, the girl has been "Miss (or Ms.) Susie [wikipedia.org]." The name 'Lucy' was reportedly used by kids in Alabama during the 80s, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was a wider region & time period.
As it turns out, though, there was/is a "Miss Lucy" song that uses the same melody, but the lyrics are completely different [wikipedia.org], and I suspect people (particularly guys) born after the mid-70s might know it better as "I had a little turtle, his name was Tiny Tim..."
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday February 11 2018, @05:57PM
I heard the "Miss Lucy" version first in northern New England. The point is, though, these variations happen, and mis-hearing or mis-remembering something is a very common reason why.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday February 10 2018, @06:43PM
That really depends on what you mean by understand. And what music you're working with. If you're trying to construct a harmony, then a printed score is a necessity unless you have an eidetic memory. This is the more true when you're working with several lines of play.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by rufty on Saturday February 10 2018, @10:12AM
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday February 11 2018, @02:57AM
I don't know whether he's still doing that. It's been a while since I was last subscribed to the user list.
He's able to use Lilypond because the source that is processed into scores looks just like TeX.
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