Music Notation Software For Unix?

CapnCheapo asks: "I was just wondering if there has been any progress on a Finale-quality music notation system out there for Linux yet? There are plenty of sequencers and simple notation programs, but I need a program that can do heavy-duty scoring, (30 staves, transposition, score analysis, custom beaming) in a graphical environment. Lilypond is great for typsetting, but is not an ideal environment for playing with musical ideas. Thanks!"

Denemo

[Anonymous Coward]

my only suggestion would be denemo. It's a frontend to lilypond, but you can get playback on your notes as you enter them. Not what you're looking for, I'm sure, but anyway it's something

ABC plus lilypond

[laymusic]

I have a similar problem -- I don't need large numbers of staves but I'm transcribing renaissance music, so I need features that aren't present in low-end systems, and flexibility that isn't available in barline-based systems.

What I'm doing at the moment is using ABC [gre.ac.uk] for the data entry. This is because I can touch type this. There are attempts to provide GUI's for ABC, none of which is yet really usable for my purposes. However, there is a lot of really good command line based software that runs fast enough for me.

Then when I have what I want, I use the abc2ly converter that comes with lilypond to do the actual typesetting. This is also software that has a long way to go. It's in python, and I found I was able to add things to it when it didn't have a feature I wanted, so by now it's pretty good for my purposes. One of the features I added was an ability to put lilypond directives as comments in the ABC, so I keep the ABC as the "source" form for my music.

You can see the final result of this process by looking at dowland.pdf [laymusic.org], and the ABC sources are on my Music publishing page [laymusic.org].

Re:MIDI and Lilypond

[darthpenguin]

There are many programs that do this. "Midisoft Studio" is a common example. You just connect a keyboard through the midi port, press the record button, then play, while it records the notes.

I'm sure there are many much more "professional" programs than midisoft, but I haven't really looked into any, as I don't actually have a midi keyboard to use it with.
-mdek.net [mdek.net]

Find a Unicode editor

[The Unconquered One]

Personally I like Bell Lab's Plan 9 sam [fywss.com] (Unix and Windows versions are avaiable) editor -- it handles Unicode text using a nifty ed-like command language. You'll need a Unicode editor, because according to the Unicode pipeline [unicode.org], several musical scripts are purposed for inclusion in Unicode:

• U+1D000..U+1D0F5 - Byzantine Musical Symbols
• U+1D100..U+1D1DD - Western Musical Symbols

The character set [virginia.edu] of the western musical symbols is available. Check if this is what you need.

FYI, other Unicode editors for Unix are available, e.g. yudit. Good luck!

Look into Ludwig van

[goingware]

I haven't seen it and the page says there's not much to it yet, but the author is apparently both a programmer and a pretty serious musician.

Check out Ludwig van [advogato.org] on Advogato [advogato.org] and also developer Cody Russel's page [advogato.org] there.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

MusicTex?

[WhyteRabbyt]

Macro package for TeX...

Pax,

White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++

Music notation software...

[evil_one]

have you tried freshmeat? [freshmeat.net] It's a pretty good resource.
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Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Linux Sound & MIDI website

[gruppa]

Are you aware of the Linux Sound & MIDI site [bright.net]? (There is also a European mirror [linuxsound.at]) It's the best collection of links to Linux music-related software and documentation I've found.

Here's their Music Notation page [bright.net].