GNU LilyPond

Welcome to the home of the GNU Music Typesetter

LilyPond homepage

What is LilyPond? What can it do for you?

LilyPond prints beautiful sheet music. It produces music notation from a description file. It excels at typesetting classical music, but you can also print pop-songs.

LilyPond input 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:

\key c \minor r8 c16 b c8 g as c16 b c8 d | g,4

LilyPond output looks beautiful. 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 anything is not to your liking, you can tweak almost everything.

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

LilyPond has a development version and a stable version. This webpage is for the stable release. This means that it won't change much, and it is essentially bug-free. On the other hand, experimental releases contain experimental and often buggy code. They are under active development, so you should use those if you need any special new features. The website of the latest development release is here

Want to know more?

If you want to know more, visit the documentation page. If you want to see some sheet music, then have a look at the examples: we have short examples and longer examples. For even more sheet music, head over to the mutopia project.

Please send GNU LilyPond questions and comments to lilypond-user@gnu.org.

Please send comments on these web pages to lilypond@packages.debian.org

Copyright (c) 1997--2001 Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.