blakme / frescobaldi

Frescobaldi LilyPond Editor

README for Frescobaldi

Homepage: http://www.frescobaldi.org/
Main author: Wilbert Berendsen

Frescobaldi is a LilyPond sheet music text editor. It aims to be powerful, yet lightweight and easy to use. Frescobaldi is Free Software, freely available under the General Public License.

Features:

• Powerful text editor with syntax highlighting and automatic completion
• Music view with advanced two-way Point & Click
• Midi player to proof-listen LilyPond-generated MIDI files
• Midi capturing to enter music
• Powerful Score Wizard to quickly setup a music score
• Snippet Manager to store and apply text snippets, templates or scripts
• Use multiple versions of LilyPond, automatically selects the correct version
• Built-in LilyPond documentation browser and built-in help
• Configurable document outline view to navigate large LilyPond scores easily
• Smart layout-control functions like coloring specific objects in the PDF
• Import ABC, Midi and MusicXML using the LilyPond-provided tools
• Experimental export to MusicXML
• Modern user interface with configurable colors, fonts and keyboard shortcuts
• Translated into: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Czech, Russian, Spanish, Galician, Turkish, Polish, Brazilian and Ukrainian.

Music functions:

• Transpose music
• Change music from relative to absolute and vice versa
• Change the language used for note names
• Change the rhythm (double, halve, add/remove dots, copy, paste) etc
• Hyphenate lyrics using word-processor hyphenation dictionaries
• Add spanners, dynamics, articulation easily using the Quick Insert panel
• Update LilyPond syntax using convert-ly, with display of differences

Frescobaldi is designed to run on all major operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X and MS Windows). It is named after Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643), an Italian composer of keyboard music in the late Renaissance and early Baroque period.

Here is an idea of the basic Frescobaldi workflow:

• Start Frescobaldi
• Open a .ly file or create one using File->New from template or Tools->Setup new Score... and fill in some music
• Press Ctrl+M to run LilyPond
• If the LilyPond output shows errors, press Ctrl+E to jump to the first error
• If you see other mistakes in the music, click the notes to move the text cursor there
• Fix the errors or mistakes in the text
• Press Ctrl+M again to update the music view
• When a piece is finished, press Ctrl+Shift+P once to run LilyPond with point and click turned off (this results in a much smaller PDF file).

Frescobaldi is written in Python and uses PyQt for its user interface. See the INSTALL file for other requirements and installation instructions.