LilyPond is the GNU Project music typesetter. This program can print beautiful sheet music from a music definition file. It can also play mechanical performances to a MIDI file. Features include multiple staffs, meters, clefs, keys, lyrics, versatile input language, cadenzas, beams, slurs, triplets, formatting scores, part extraction. It includes a nice font of musical symbols.
This is an overview of the features that GNU LilyPond supports. For details on how to use them, you should consult mudela(5).
GNU LilyPond is copyright 1996-1998 by its authors. GNU LilyPond is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. GNU LilyPond is provided without any warranty what so ever. GNU LilyPond may be freely distributed. For further information consult the GNU General Public License, from the file COPYING.
There is an extensive list of todoes and bugs. See TODO. If you have a problem you should try to find out
If you have found a bug, then you should send a bugreport.
It does help if you can find out where the bug comes from: if GNU LilyPond bombs out, then please recompile using with debugging info turned on, and send gdb stacktrace of the crash. It also helps if you can print the values of the objects. So if your trace is
received SIGSEGV (gdb) backtrace 12 #0 Interval::operator+= (this=0x11fffec60..) at ../flower/interval.hh:50 #1 0x12005195c in Item::width (this=0x14008a680) at src/item.cc:39 #2 0x12008fdbc in itemlist_width (its=0x11fffed58 .. : :)
Then it would help if you send a dump of the Interval and the Item
(use: print *this
or use LilyPond print()
methods).
manspagesection(environment)
Lots of them. See TODO and BUGS
GNU LilyPond is updated very frequently, the latest version is always available at: ftp://pcnov095.win.tue.nl/pub/lilypond and ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/lilypond/
For programs which are part of the GNU music project, the following mailing list have been setup:
Announces of new versions will be sent to info-gnu-music and gnu-music-discuss.
GNU LilyPond has no connection with the music package Rosegarden, other than the names being similar (:-)
(for a detailed changelog, see NEWS)
GNU LilyPond's roots lie in MPP, a preprocessor to the rather arcane MusiXTeX macro package for TeX. A friend of mine, Jan Nieuwenhuizen wrote the first 44 versions (0.01 to 0.44), then his program caught my attention, and I was slowly sucked in to the interesting problem of easily producing beautifully printed music. I contributed some code. We soon realised that MPP's design was too fundamentally broken to be repaired, so it was decided to rewrite MPP. We debated a lot about the requirements to an inputformat (fall 1995). I sat down and started with a parser-first, bottom-up rewrite called mpp95 (which totally failed, obviously).
After long and hard thinking, I came up with an algorithm for the horizontal spacing of multiple staffs (april 1996) I coded it (and did not test it). After starting with this fundamental piece, I slowly added the stages which come before spacing, and after. A half year later, I had a first working version, (october 1996). I announced Patchlevel 0.0.7 (or 8) to the mutex list after asking some technical details on spacing; it was downloaded approximately 4 times. Then I got the hang of it, and in the subsequent two months, I coded until it had doubled in size (pl 23).
Most the other history is described in the NEWS file. The first large scale release (0.1) was done after approximately 78 patchlevels on August 1, 1997.
Please consult the documentation file AUTHORS.txt for more detailed information, and small contributions.