Notation software for Unix/Linux?

[Eulipion2]

Hello,
I've recently begun channelling my inner geek, teaching myself to use the Unix core of Mac OS X, and I'm discovering all the freeware that's available to Unix/Linux.

As a result of this search I found a few notation programs, and was wondering if anyone was familiar with any of them? The text-based ones make very nice print-outs/engravings, and I only saw one or two graphical notation applications. In the documentation to one of the text-based applications, Lilypond, it says that experienced users have reported input rates of up to 3.5 pages per hour. How does that compare to plugging notes into Sibelius with a mouse and keyboard?

Basically, are there any Un*x users out there who use this kind of software? Experiences?

Thanks!

[bkiser]

Eulipion,

Very interesting- I am gonna have to check it out. I work on AIX all day long (IBM's Enterprise-level UNIX) and have a Mac at home (because its UNIX!). We got a few Linux PowerPC servers for free and we just play around with them (game servers, MP3 repositories, etc), so now I think I am gonna have to requisition one for notation purposes.

Which applications would you recommend at this point?

[Eulipion2]

bkiser,
The one that kept popping up as the dominant application was called LilyPond (www.lilypond.org), which is kinda neat, but it's definitely not point-and-click. You enter text and symbols, save it as a text file, and LilyPond processes your input, turning it into what looks like really beautiful sheet music. There are a couple other utilities (Denemo) that give LilyPond a graphical front end, but I think it'll be fun to learn Lily's notation language. Sometimes I'm too geeky for my own good. However, if it works out alright, I'll never have to pay ridiculous amounts to upgrade my Sibelius 4.1.

LilyPond's website shows all about what they were going for in output, etc, etc, and I have to say, based on the examples, it's really beautiful stuff. Check it out, let me know what you think.

[bkiser]

Thanks for the info. I am going to check it out. Honestly, I would rather NOT have a gui in many cases, though I am not sure that this is one of them. Of course, being able to use vi to turnout scores is pretty cool.