Music Composition Software for the Mac

I'm also about 2 years late to the party, but I agree with you on this front. I do wish that the mac had some accessible music notation softwear for the blind composers among us blind folks who find this sort of thing enjoyable.

There's lilly pond, but I lost patience with it as I am not good at programing. You write the notes with some variables and it prints out professionally looking pdfs. I wrote an orchestra piece for my class with it.

Ironically, in spite of my rant earlier in this topic, I've since moved to using Lilypond - and personally, I love it. The scores, from what I've been told, are very attractive, and the only time thus far I've had any sort of formatting issue was in some choral music where I split one of the parts into multiple parts, and the choir director commented that it was confusing because the beams on the parts weren't traveling the right direction. And that's just because I split the parts in a kind of roundabout way, rather than the way you're supposed to.

Anyway, all that is to say, it's a great program for engraving nice-looking scores, and for outputting midi files of your project. It does have its shortcomings, though. The text-based interface, while making it very blind-user friendly, also presents a significant learning curve. And I don't think it'd be a good option for the beginning composer, just because it's a lot easier to drag notes around on a staff than to understand the score well enough to know how it needs to be laid out and then type all of that using the text, and then track down any mistakes you might have made. The only other minor nuisance, for me, is the fact that to hear the changes I've just made, I have to save the file, compile it, and then listen to the midi and skip ahead to the end, whereas more graphical score writing programs might have an option to play the score from within the program. But honestly, on a whole, I love it. Definitely not for everyone, but worth checking out if you find yourself in the same boat I did.

New to this forum, and music study. It was recommended to me to purchase the i Real Pro app for my current course of study at a Florida music school. Thousands of music compositions, tutorials, samples et al etc. Unfortunately, the App does not "read" the charts/sheet(s) for any composition. Anyone know if there is any app for iPhone 5S+ that "reads" music sheets? If so, what/where? Kind of "challenging" to "follow along" and sight read music, you know...E7 dominate with a 1/4 rest then a G7 etc. Help?! (Hard to play bass and "read" bumps...Thanks in advance.

I comit all of my choral music to memmory, I did the same for years with my orchestra music and plan to keep doing it for my conducting as well.

I do the same, but we're talking about composing, not necessarrally reading.

Hi all, I have a lot of music in my mind that I wish I could composed using a keyboard or piano, but unfortunately my playing the skills are not as adept as the way I play it with my mouth if you will. Is it possible for me to try to compose the music that I make with my mouth using this notation style software? Thanks a lot! if y'all would like, I can try to make a recording of what I do with my mouth so you can kind of understand where I'm coming from. Also, I forgot to mention this earlier but, is there any software that would take sound that you make and converted into notes?

No. you write the text out like for example {c d e f } {e d c2} I think that's how the code goes. have not touched it since last year.

Is this software free?

Its not only free, but open source so if you iknow the code it's written in you can tweek it to fix bugs.

Hi, is this app in the app store, or do I need to get it somewhere else?

Look up lilypond. it will never be in the app store because of the nature of the beast. Don't always assume that every app is in the app store. Osx is not ios.

If you go to www.lilypond.org, you can download the program from there. Like I said before, just be prepared for a learning curve, especially if you've never used any sort of scripting language, as lilypond input files are very similar to a programming language in some respects. I'm happy to offer any help that I can - I've gotten a lot of great mileage out of this program. I'll warn you that when it starts to get really challenging is in polyphonic staves - piano parts, or the like.

Yeah. the piece I'm arranging now is literally 2 parts, SS, S2S2, AA and A2A2 plus a complex piano part. I stopped coding it as I got frustrated witht he whole thing. I might consider going back to it. I also took a look at music xml but that code is harder then Lily pond. Lol! Hehahahahahaha.

I think some awesome person should make an applevis podcast about this app. That could be really fun.

it's hard to make a podcast about this app as all you have to do is learn the code by reading the manual. Also like one of the posters said it's good and easyuntil you get to vocal and orchestral scores. I had to write a piano reduction of Britain's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. Not fun, but I got an A in it.

Ah. Okay. That kinda makes sence.

Well, if anyone can give a sort of manual to the code for a beginner, and a person that usually plays by ear, then that'd be good. The original lilypond manual just goes too fast for me.

I also play by ear but whawt i did was I just grabbed th big.html and practiced evryting on my own stuff. managed to sort of code somethingn readable for my orchestra class I was taking.

I might be able to whip up a quickstart guide to Lilypond code for beginners, and post it on here - then that'd be a good thread where people could ask questions, too. Fair warning, though...if I get around to something like that, it's not going to be in the immediate future. But I'll definitely think about it if I have the time at some point.

On a side note, someone mentioned that it's easy until you get to orchestral and vocal scores... Orchestral and vocal scores (at least a capella vocals) never gave me too much trouble, because most of those are a single voice per staff, with the occasional split part. It's only when the orchestral or vocal score involves a piano part, or other polyphonic instrument, that it starts to make my head hurt. That said, I've been able to manage it - but I have to be sitting in front of a piano so that I can play out the part over and over again, and really break it down in my head bit by bit; that's how I have to score complex parts like that, personally.

It was me who said that. No No for me it's losing the line I'm on as I have to think vertically to make sure things ine up rhythmically and coding it right. I get a whole bunch of errors, or did. when I would do bengimen Britain's Young Person's guide to orchestra.

the 8 part women's arangement I'm working has a complex piano part with sextuplets when the choir rests. I don't give the pianist mercy. it will be hard as hades to code but I'm sure I can do it. I might start learningn lily pond again actually so I can finish this.