Open Source Sheet Music Software

[monsieurdozier]

I'm looking for an open source good program that I can write and playback sheet music. Something along the lines of Finale. Any suggestions?

Monsieur Dozier

[Sidster]

If you dont mind using QT/KDE apps then rosegarden (http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/) is for you

If however you really have to use a GTK/GNOME app then there's also LilyPond (http://lilypond.org/web/) (A music notation backend) that can be used with a GTK/GNOME frontend you can find here (http://denemo.sourceforge.net/)

Rosegarden is generally more polished than LilyPond with Denemo frontend but you'll have to install QT\KDE libraries in Gnome, which by the way isn't all that hard these days what with synaptic automatically selecting the necessary packages for you. There is an interesting article here (http://www.linux.com/feature/118302) that pretty much sums it all up.

Now all you have to do is search for these programs in synaptic (they're already in the Ubuntu repos) and click install

Good luck!

P.S. I'd be interested to read your opinion of these fine applications if you don't mind commenting on them :-)

[monsieurdozier]

I'll give them a try.

Monsieur Dozier

[IYY]

For the best output, you should use pure LilyPond. However, it's pretty difficult to use: you write everything in a text file and then "compile" it.

[Ozor Mox]

Expanding on Sidster's post, an alternative KDE application to Rosegarden is NoteEdit, which is a dedicated sheet music editor instead of being a sequencer with an editor built in. I haven't got MIDI playback to work in either however, this seems to require a lot of configuration. You might also try Canorus, the sequel to NoteEdit.

Lilypond produces great output but has a very steep learning curve. Producing simple sheet music is fine, but once you get in to more complicated stuff it gets tricky. It's a great application, but I'd rather not feel like I'm learning another language and have to deal with debugging and compiling problems...that's for programming not music!

[stmiller]

MuseScore (http://mscore.sourceforge.net/en/idx.php) is a great program. It is pretty much a Sibelius clone that uses the nice Lilypond font.

Plays back with sound fonts, MIDI input, and so forth.