Composing Music

Frescobaldi – LilyPond sheet music text editor

Frescobaldi is a LilyPond sheet music text editor for KDE.

It is a powerful program for creating and editing music notation. It aims to be powerful, yet lightweight and easy to use.

Frescobaldi provides a host of features to help you to enter LilyPond music scores as quickly as possible.

Features include:

  • Enter LilyPond scores, then build and preview them with a mouse click.
  • Point-and-click support: click on notes or on error messages to jump to the corresponding position in the LilyPond file.
  • A Score Setup Wizard that helps you to quickly setup a LilyPond score, generating LilyPond input in a very human-like way.
  • Blank staff paper generator.
  • Syntax coloring that also signals some often made mistakes.
  • Snippet manager to enter Lilypond snippets using keystrokes or mnemonics.
  • Context sensitive autocompletion, helping you to enter LilyPond commands.
  • Hyphenate lyrics using wordprocessor hyphenation dictionaries.
  • Built-in editor to enter and manipulate music:
    • Advanced syntax coloring that also signals some often made errors.
    • Auto-indent nested structures, those can be folded for quick overview.
    • Context sensitive autocompletion, to quickly enter commands and parameters.
    • Manipulate pitch (transpose, translate, relative/absolute conversion).
    • Manipulate rhythm (scale, copy/paste durations over other music, etc).
    • Hyphenate lyrics.
    • Quickly enter or add articulations and other symbols to existing music.
    • Run the document through convert-ly to update it to a newer LilyPond version.
    • Expansion dialog to enter larger snippets of LilyPond input using keyboard shortcuts or short mnemonics.
  • A powerful Rumor plugin, using the Rumor program to quickly enter music by playing it on a MIDI keyboard or even your computer keyboard.
  • Kinetic scrolling in the music view.
  • Built-in MIDI player, terminal, and a blank staff paper generator which creates blank music staff paper and prints it or saves it to a file:
    • Five types of staff paper: Single staff, piano staff, organ staff, choir staff, and custom staff.
  • LilyPond documentation browser with context sensitive lookup.
  • User Guide with help buttons (F1).
  • Internationalisation support: Translated into Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Czech, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Polish.

Website: frescobaldi.org
Support: Manual
Developer: Wilbert Berendsen
License: GNU General Public License v2.0

Frescobaldi

Frescobaldi is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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