Music Notation Editors

• ABC
  • ABC is "...a language designed to notate tunes in an ascii format" (This page is the main resource for abc-related packages)
  • ABC Plus Project many enhancements from Guido Gonzato, including his abcpp (abc preprocessor) and JedABC (abc file editor)
  • Jef's ABC page Jean-François Moine's wonderful extension software, includes abc2mps (abc files to Postscript) and tclabc (Tcl/Tk interface for abc files)
  • Skink nice front-end for abc, requires Java
  • abcMIDI renders abc score to MIDI file
• Canorus a new music notation program from Reinhard Katzmann & Crew
• Common Music Notation creates and displays traditional Western music scores
• Fripp unique notation-based composition system, from Julianne Sharer
• Gscore "a non-page-oriented notation program", from Sebastien Tricaud
• Gsharp extensible Lisp-based music score editor from Christophe Rhodes and Robert Strandh
• GUIDO a music notation formatting system and server
• LilyPond
  • LilyPond is the music typesetter for Linux, outputs TeX, PostScript, PDF, and MIDI files, with an awesome features set and beautiful notation
  • Denemo GTK front-end for Lilypond
  • Emacs MIDI Input an elisp mode for step-time entry from a MIDI keyboard, from Hans Lub
  • LilyComp a graphic note-entry utility for LilyPond, requires Python and Tkinter
  • LilyKDE "... a set of tools to integrate the very fine LilyPond music typesetter into KDE"
  • LilyPondTool a plugin for jEdit, provides functions similar to Emacs modes
  • Rumor Vaclav Smilauer's Really Unintelligent Music transcriptOR, a "realtime monophonic (with chords) MIDI keyboard to Lilypond converter"
  • Tutorial de Lilypond A LilyPond tutorial in Spanish, from David Asorey Álvarez
  • LilyPond Guide For Beginners a set of introductory tutorials from Eugene Cormier
  • lyqi an Emacs major mode for quick insert of LilyPond score code
• Mup music publication shareware from Arkkra Enterprises
  • MUP Utilities more useful software from Bob van der Poel
• MuseScore the MusE WYSIWYG music typesetter, more great software from Werner Schweer
• MusicEdit music notation software with MIDI output, from Professor Herbert Walz
• MusicXML "... a universal translator for common Western musical notation... designed as an interchange format for notation, analysis, retrieval, and performance applications"
• MusiXTeX full-featured music typesetting via TeX (This page is also the main resource for other TeX-related notation packages)
• MuX2D graphic editor for MusiXTeX files, from Lukas Grützmacher
• NoteEdit an excellent Qt-based notation editor with output in LilyPond, MIDI, and MusicXML formats
• NtED excellent music notation editor from Dr. Joerg Anders
• PMW Philip's Music Writer, an easy-to-use music typesetting program
• Rosegarden score creation from MIDI input and MIDI sequencer, also exports Csound score file
• TinyMOODS demo of a very interesting music notation medium
• XCircuit a drawing package for X which includes some very nice music typography and outputs Postscript files
• gcomposer "a little tool to write music", another goodie from Sed
• tab a lute tablature typesetting system, from Wayne Cripps