LilyPond 2.18.2-1

Prints music in the best traditions of classical engraving with minimum fuss

LilyPond is a music engraving program, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. It brings the aesthetics of traditionally engraved music to computer printouts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.