Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Sonic Pi VS LilyPond

Compare Sonic Pi VS LilyPond and see what are their differences

Sonic Pi logo Sonic Pi

Sonic Pi is a new kind of instrument for a new generation of musicians. It is simple to learn, powerful enough for live performances and free to download.

LilyPond logo LilyPond

GNU LilyPond is a computer program for music engraving.
  • Sonic Pi Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-05
  • LilyPond Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-29

Sonic Pi videos

Making Music with Code (Using Sonic Pi)

More videos:

  • Review - Sam Aaron - Live Coding - Sonic Pi Practice Streaming
  • Review - CPEU3 - Sonic Pi: Teaching computer science with music. SAM AARON

LilyPond videos

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

More videos:

  • Review - Lilypond Carry-On Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Sonic Pi and LilyPond)
Music Generation
100 100%
0% 0
Music Tools
43 43%
57% 57
Audio & Music
0 0%
100% 100
3D
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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

Sonic Pi might be a bit more popular than LilyPond. We know about 63 links to it since March 2021 and only 43 links to LilyPond. 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.

Sonic Pi mentions (63)

  • Seeking Ideas for Preschool/School Projects
    With my 7 years old I started to thinker with https://www.scratchjr.org/. She like to create short movies with it. The next level will be https://sonic-pi.net/. - Source: Hacker News / 13 days ago
  • Anyone else using ChatGPT to make music?
    I have wondered what grooves it could come with using https://sonic-pi.net/. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • History of the Web - Part 1
    On a seriously light-hearted note, Herve Aniglo, talked about teaching children to code with music using Sonic PI, a language agnostic platform that helps you learn recursions, looping, circuit breaking and functional programming by creating simple tunes. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Genuary 2024: Generative Art / Creative Coding Month
    Https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPYzvS8A_rTYEba_4SDvRJyIyjKaDNjn9 - Sonic Pi is built on-top of SuperCollider, but it's MUCH easier to get started with making bleeps and bloops. Sam Aaron, who originally created Overtone (a Clojure front-end for SuperCollider) created Sonic Pi initially to teach kids computer programming and music, but now it's turning into a pretty nice live-coding setup. The language is... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • I really got traumatized
    There is a programming language+IDE called SonicPI. It's designed to create music by writing code. You can install the program from the lin, then ask chatGPT to generate some sonic PI code that produces some nice melody. Then just copy the code and paste it into the sonicPI program, and run it by clicking the run button. Here's a conversation for example. Source: 11 months ago
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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 / 6 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 / 6 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 / 6 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: 7 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 Sonic Pi and LilyPond, you can also consider the following products

SuperCollider - A real time audio synthesis engine, and an object-oriented programming language specialised for...

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

Pure Data - Pd (aka Pure Data) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical...

Guitar Pro 7 - Create, play and share your tabs

ChucK - A strongly-timed music programming language

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.