Software Alternatives & Reviews

LilyPond VS Frescobaldi

Compare LilyPond VS Frescobaldi and see what are their differences

LilyPond logo LilyPond

GNU LilyPond is a computer program for music engraving.

Frescobaldi logo Frescobaldi

Frescobaldi is a LilyPond sheet music text editor.
  • LilyPond Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-29
  • Frescobaldi Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13

LilyPond videos

LilyPond Tutorial 1 - Introduction to LilyPond (Your First Score)

More videos:

  • Review - Lilypond Carry-On Review

Frescobaldi videos

LilyPond Tutorial 3 - Introduction to Frescobaldi and LilyPond

More videos:

  • Review - "Italian Wine" - "Nipozzano Riserva" 2009 - "Marchesi de' Frescobaldi" - "Stile Italia Tv"
  • Review - Castelgiocondo 2015 Brunello di Montalcino, Frescobaldi

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to LilyPond and Frescobaldi)
Music Tools
81 81%
19% 19
Audio & Music
100 100%
0% 0
Music
79 79%
21% 21
Audio
71 71%
29% 29

User comments

Share your experience with using LilyPond and Frescobaldi. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, LilyPond should be more popular than Frescobaldi. It has been mentiond 43 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

LilyPond mentions (43)

  • MIDI Editor
    Why use this when you could just use Lilypond, which is free, open source, and has a legacy in TeX: https://lilypond.org. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Show HN: TuneType – a font that has (guitar) chords embedded as ligatures
    > since its width was set to 0 Is this totally necessary? It might be. I don't know much about font programming. If the values have to be hard-coded. If you can get me a contact info, I could send you the master list of chords.. Maybe you could use that. > I think a more “advanced” use case like the one you described can be addressed by something like https://lilypond.org Lilypond is a music engraving system. That... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Show HN: TuneType – a font that has (guitar) chords embedded as ligatures
    So I need to pack the font itself with both the A and the Am6 ligatures… I think a more “advanced” use case like the one you described can be addressed by something like https://lilypond.org. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Make measure width smaller?
    At lilypond.org I found some tips, but they all were for the complete score. I don't want my score to be compressed or have smaller notes as I'm rewriting the music because the original notes are to small for me. Source: 6 months ago
  • Caught by MuseScore's Dark Patterns
    As far as open-source software is concerned, you can use Lilypond [1]. Fully text-based transcription. You can edit, insert, splice, overwrite, etc. To your heart's content in your favorite text editor and get a high-quality engraving as output. [1] https://lilypond.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
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Frescobaldi mentions (9)

  • Real-Time MIDI to LilyPond Notes for integration into text editors
    In other words, you do not need to embed this functionality into your editor, you simply need to have your editor communicate with this backend in order to have the basic MIDI input working! As I mentioned in my other post, the MIDI input functionality and features were heavily inspired by Frescobaldi and a bit by Denemo. Source: 6 months ago
  • MuseScore 4.1 is now available
    Also, there's Frescobaldi, which is essentially an IDE for LilyPond: https://frescobaldi.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Any free/mod software to help in writing songs?
    Lilypond with the Frescobaldi front end is one open source solution. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Engraving Program Blues
    I'd argue Lilypond has the best of both worlds since it's free and very powerful with minimal tweaking, but it uses text-based input that might not be for everyone. I recommend using Frescobaldi if you do want to give Lilypond a shot, but there's certainly a learning curve. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Announcement: Welcome our new Moderator!
    If anyone wants to try to learn it in the future, I recommend checking out Frescobaldi, a text editor made specifically for Lilypond. It has a "score wizard" feature that will help you set up your score and instruments without having to enter everything manually, a live preview so you don't have to manually compile your score every time, and a lot of other nice features. Source: about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing LilyPond and Frescobaldi, you can also consider the following products

Sibelius - Sibelius is a virtual score creation tool which allows composers to easily create new piano scores, developed by Avid.

MuseScore.org - Create, play back and print beautiful sheet music with free and easy to use music notation software MuseScore. For Windows, Mac and Linux.

Guitar Pro 7 - Create, play and share your tabs

Denemo - GNU Denemo is a music notation editor that lets you rapidly enter notation for typesetting via the...

Finale - Finale, the world standard for music notation software, lets you compose, arrange, notate, and print engraver-quality sheet music.

Rosegarden - Rosegarden is a powerful audio, MIDI and score editing and sequencing environment for musicians.