for the past two decades I’ve been using Lilypond to engrave everything music related. With the help of the community I’ve created templates for 10 course lute so I’ll spend less time creating the framework and just write the music.
If you don’t know Lilypond, it is one of the most advanced music engraving tool out there, and it’s open source. I won’t get into much details about it, you can read it all in the website. But Lilypond, advanced as it is also have many issue, most, if not all can be solved using the great discussion groups. There are a lot of option, for me, too many options. I couldn’t tweak my framework to the degree I wanted, some tweaks are not possible (for my knowledge) and some takes too many resources.
Unlike most other softwares out there, Lilypond is using text to produce the output, it’s more like programming then music writing and for me it takes longer to write some types of compositions. Also, as I write this, there is no support to export Lilypond to MusicXML, which means, sharing between supported applications like MuseScore, Finale and Sibelius.
Another issue with Lilypond is the MacOS support. There is a support, kind of, but it’s unofficial, so it can stop at any day for no reason whatsoever. The last package for 64 bit is Lilypond 2.22 from 2020 while the official stable release is 2.22.2, you can use HomeBrew or MacPorts to get the latest versions but it depends on the maintainers.
The solution for my problems came from a lute discussion group and it’s called MuseScore. Unlike Lilypond it has a point and click paradigm, which I’m not used to, but the results are instant. I can see right away and I don’t have to compile the file to see the result. In the first hour I managed to create a framework for 10 course lute, although with only treble staff and I will have to get used to point and click again, but I like it. Getting used to a new software is not an easy task, but I need to get better results and for now, MuseScore is the best option.
So this is it Lilypond, I’m sorry ,but it doesn’t work anymore between us. We had some good time together, but it’s time to move on.