What is LilyPond?

LilyPond is a music typesetter. It produces beautiful sheet music using a high level description file as input. It excels at typesetting classical music, but you can also print pop-songs. With LilyPond we hope to make music publication software available to anyone on the internet.

Why should I use it?

The input to LilyPond is plain text. So, you can use your favorite text editor to enter it, you can put it in mail or embed it in an article like this:

\relative c'' { \key c \minor; r8 c16 b c8 g as c16 b c8 d | g,4 }

The output looks very good: the font and the layout algorithms were inspired by engraved music, so you can expect that same clear and elegant look from your LilyPond output. And if you don't like the looks, you can tweak almost everything.

The program also has limited MIDI functionality: you can write MIDI files with lilypond, and we have a simple MIDI to lilypond conversion tool, midi2ly. Conversion tools for PMX, MUP, ABC, Finale and Musedata are also included.

LilyPond is free software. It is licensed under GNU General Public License, so you can use, modify and redistribute the program with almost no restrictions. LilyPond is part of the GNU Project.

The version numbers are in Linux-kernel style: even numbered versions are `stable'. The webpages for the stable version (1.2) reside on the GNU servers. Big enhancements go into the latest odd numbered version (1.3), whose webpages are on Han-Wen's site. Information on the latest and greatest features can be found in the Change Log.

If want more information, you can browse the manual or other documentation.

Sheet music

If you are interested in sheet music typeset by LilyPond, have a look at the examples included. We have short examples and longer examples. The examples include sound bites in MIDI, pictures in PNG, printable scores in PostScript, and LilyPond input. Others use LilyPond too, and have put scores on the web. Head over to http://appel.lilypond.org/wiki?DownloadLilyPondScores

Download

• Download stable releases at GNU
• Download development releases from the source
• by http (Canadian mirror) and ftp (Canadian mirror)
• mirror (Europe)

Installing and compiling requires many additional packages, which are listed in the installation instructions. Binaries are available, but are not updated for every version released.

• RedHat i386
• LinuxPPC
• Debian GNU/Linux Stable
• Debian GNU/Linux Unstable
• Windows Stable
• Windows Testing

If you have questions, do write to the mailing lists. But don't forget to read the Very Frequently Asked Questions and Frequently Asked Questions first.

• info-gnu-music@gnu.org is a low-volume list for information on the GNU Music project. This list is moderated; ask David R. Linn or Han-Wen to send announcements for this list.
• help-gnu-music@gnu.org For help with using LilyPond.
• bug-gnu-music@gnu.org If you have bugreports, you should send them to this list.

  Please include in your bugreport the version of LilyPond that you experience the problem with, a description of your system and sample input to reproduce the problem. Do not send output files over the list, they tend to be very big and don't help with describing the problem.

• gnu-music-discuss@gnu.org For discussions concerning LilyPond.

These pages were entirely created from a development snapshot of the LilyPond package. The version of this webpage is printed at the bottom.