NOTATIO

Hello all

I'm wondering how many of you use Lilypond?

Regular or occasional user? What projects have you done with Lilypond?

I tried searching the forum but there are too many 'Lilypond' results for the search to display.

Forum member @Schneider was a Lilypond developer, but it appears he hasn't been active lately.

I have used Lilypond with Frescobaldi for some years now, but only for single-instrument or duo scores. I am planning a few larger projects (a book of etudes, a piece for chamber orchestra which will require printing both parts and score, and am also looking at the possibility of using Lilypond generated musical examples in a textbook-type book.

Does anyone have much experience with this? I'd love to look at some of your solutions for the issues i'm anticipating, if you're willing to share.

(Of course, I know there is a Lilypond community forum as well)

Thanks!

Pax!
dirck

I used to use it quite a lot for engraving a mix of choral, piano, and solo works. I’ve had less frequent opportunity recently. Still my go-to software of choice though when I really want to control things. If I need to pound something out quickly and don’t care how it looks, I will use MuseScore.

Was there something specific you were wondering about?

Hello! Interesting question. When Igor Engraver died -- as Peter Bengtson would have put it -- I tried out Lilypond both with and without Frescobaldi but found that it was not suitable as a composition tool so I left it there and then. Igor Engraver has been great to make music examples in for textbooks.

I've been curious to try it, but there doesn't seem to be an up-to-date, currently supported, standalone build for macOS available on the website.

The alternative is to use MacPorts or HomeBrew, which I'd rather not.

And frankly, music notation is a visual medium, so I find the GUI approach much more immediate, without having to abstract things into code. Plus of course, playback.
And while there are several converters of various formats into Lilypond, there don't seem to be (m)any converts out of lilypond, making it a bit of a dead end.

So, I spent some time, and eventually found a page where you can download arm64 mac binaries. Then I spent some time trying to find out where I should put them, and adding the location to my $PATH, setting file attributes, etc., etc.

Then I discovered that Frescobaldi would actually download lilypond binaries via its Preferences. (Though it just says "Add" and it wasn't clear whether you were just pointing it to an existing installation on your disk.)
But it downloaded an Intel build, not an ARM build.

I then discovered the location where Frescobaldi stores lilypond; moved my ARM64 build to that location, and then tried to get Frescobaldi to use it, which took some effort.

I dare say that I should have read some documentation first, but spending a lot of time to achieve very little is a classic Linux experience.

But if I quickly needed to view or modify a lilypond document, I now have that option!

I tested Lilypond with Denemo, which is a different animal than Frescobaldi. I actually rather liked it, and if the competition had only been Sibelius I might have chosen Lilypond. But then I tried Dorico, and Dorico won.

jrethorst wrote: 10 Sep 2026, 19:49 I tested Lilypond with Denemo, which is a different animal than Frescobaldi. I actually rather liked it, and if the competition had only been Sibelius I might have chosen Lilypond. But then I tried Dorico, and Dorico won.

Interesting what you are saying about Denemo. I tried it on several occasions - I use Linux for everything, and don't want to have to boot Windows for Dorico or other apps more alive than Finale - but it never looked as a serious application to me. As you seem to have liked it better than Sibelius, can you maybe elaborate what you were using it for?

I exclusively use LilyPond because it still does a lot of things that no other program does (optical scaling and rounding off the hard edges of lines) and because the input format makes it much easier to diagnose if something is off. As I get older I find myself more and more impatient with WYSIWYG as opposed to the LilyPond/LaTeX workflow (though I prefer Typst to LaTeX these days since it's much more modern)

jrethorst wrote: 10 Sep 2026, 19:49 I tested Lilypond with Denemo, which is a different animal than Frescobaldi. I actually rather liked it, and if the competition had only been Sibelius I might have chosen Lilypond. But then I tried Dorico, and Dorico won.

I first started using Lilypond with Denemo too. It worked well; was a good introduction. I started using Frescobaldi once I had gotten to the point in Denemo where it became easier to type in Lilypond code to make edits.

It took a little time to get used to, but the learning curve wasn't bad.

Peace!
dirck

tisimst wrote: 10 Sep 2026, 04:39...

Schonbergian wrote: 11 Sep 2026, 13:24...

Thanks for replying!

I'm hoping to use LaTeX, but I have zero experience. I don't even know how to download it.

I also am unclear on Lilypond-Book, so this will be a total beginner experience!

I think the first project I will tackle will be a book of very easy piano pieces, since they are already engraved in Lilypond, and there are only 4 of them. THis way, I would be able to experiment with editing.

I'm hoping to get enough experience from this to begin building templates for books of etudes and preludes (also short, already engraved, but a lot more complex engraving)

Do either of you have any scores (similar to my project ... maybe a hymnal, or collection of small pieces) you'd be willing to share with me, so I can look at the code? Or perhaps just a printed work? Anything small and simple?

I'd be happy to buy them, of course! Not trying to steal from your publishers or pirate your work or anything!

Peace!
dirck