Software Alternatives & Reviews

MagicScore VS LilyPond

Compare MagicScore VS LilyPond and see what are their differences

MagicScore logo MagicScore

MagicScore is an easy and powerful music notation and composition software.

LilyPond logo LilyPond

GNU LilyPond is a computer program for music engraving.
  • MagicScore Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-03-04
  • LilyPond Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-29

MagicScore videos

What makes MagicScore Maestro 8 an excellent music notation software

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to write blues licks with MagicScore Guitar 8

LilyPond videos

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

More videos:

  • Review - Lilypond Carry-On Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to MagicScore and LilyPond)
Music Tools
23 23%
77% 77
Audio & Music
26 26%
74% 74
Music
29 29%
71% 71
Musician Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare MagicScore and LilyPond

MagicScore Reviews

The 10 Best Music Writing Software Programs (2022)
It also offers virtual piano as a top-notch feature, editing velocities, and many templates. MagicScore Maestro 8 also contains shortcuts for easy accessibility.

LilyPond Reviews

We have no reviews of LilyPond yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, LilyPond seems to be more popular. 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.

MagicScore mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of MagicScore yet. Tracking of MagicScore recommendations started around Mar 2021.

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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What are some alternatives?

When comparing MagicScore and LilyPond, 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.

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...

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.

OpenMPT - OpenMPT is a popular tracker software for Windows.

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