LilyPond

LilyPond is a free score writing application. Its input is a plain text file in the LilyPond music writing format, and its output is in either PostScript or PDF.

Installation

Install the lilypond package.

Front-ends

Denemo — Supports keyboard, MIDI and acoustic input, written in C.

http://denemo.org/ || denemo^AUR

Frescobaldi — Provides music view with two-way point & click, MIDI capturing and playback, written in Python with PyQt.

https://www.frescobaldi.org/index.html || frescobaldi

Usage

Create a test file like:

test.ly

{
 c' e' g' e'
}

To compile it, use:

$ lilypond test.ly

It will create test.pdf and test.ps files that contain your score.

LilyPond provides musicxml2ly(1) to convert MusicXML to the LilyPond format.

For more information, see info lilypond, lilypond(1) and the documentation.

Text editor support

LilyPond comes with modes for Emacs and Vim, see the documentation.

For Vim see the filetype plugin /usr/share/vim/vimfiles/ftplugin/lilypond.vim for the available key mappings.

Emacs lilypond-mode

lilypond package installs some Emacs files including /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/lilypond-mode.el.

To use lilypond-mode, firstly M-x load-library <RET> lilypond-mode <RET> then again M-x lilypond-mode <RET>.

NeoVim

nvim-lilypond-suite is a plugin for writing LilyPond scores with asynchronous make, midi/MP3 player, "hyphenation" function for lyrics, fast syntax highlighting... This repository also contains an ftplugin for LaTeX files which allows embedded LilyPond syntax highlighting, and makeprg which support lilypond-book or lyluatex-git^AUR package out of the box.