Why switch to LilyPond?
“... music produced by LilyPond is exceptionally pretty ...” - Computer!Totaal.
- Text-based input
- LilyPond takes ASCII input, which you can produce in your favorite environment, quickly and comfortably. No more futzing with the mouse. The input contains all the information, so there is no need to remember complex command sequences. Simply save an input for later reference.
- No fiddling
- Don't waste time with tweaking the output; LilyPond gets the formatting correct right from the start. It determines spacing by itself, and breaks lines and pages to provide a tight and uniform layout. Clashes between lyrics, notes, and chords are resolved and slurs and beams are sloped, automatically!
- Excellent classical engraving
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All style settings, font designs and algorithms have been inspired
by the finest hand-engraved music. LilyPond output has that same
strong and balanced look as a classical score. (Read more)
- Mix music and text
- Put fragments of music into texts with without cutting and pasting pictures. Integrate music into LaTeX or HTML seamlessly, or add music to OpenOffice.org with ooolilypond.
- Even better than part extraction!
- Parts and score are made from the same source file, so every change always gets into both score and parts. (demo). In addition, LilyPond can combine staves in scores and insert cue-notes from other parts.
- Free software
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LilyPond can be downloaded free of charge! Yep - It's free.
Get it from the download page.
It's also free (as in "speech") software. It comes with source code, and permission to change and copy it. So, are you irritated by a bug, or yearning for a feature? Simply add it yourself, or persuade/pay someone else to do it for you.
- Extensible design
- All settings can be changed to suit your personal typographical taste. If that still is not enough, there is always the built-in scripting language, a dialect of the powerful language LISP. Settings, variables and functions are all documented in the comprehensive program reference manual.
- Excellent support
- LilyPond runs on all popular platforms: Linux, MacOS X, and Windows. LilyPond comes with a 300 page user manual and over 400 example files. There is an active user community answering questions on the Lilypond user mailing list, while the development team makes sure that problems are solved quickly.
- Impressive list of features
- Many features and notational constructs, see the list of features.
