(Oct / 99)

* What is it?

In short, LilyPond does for sheet music what (La)TeX does for printed
text: the input describes the music you want printed, the program
processes the input like a compiler, and the output file contains
printed music.

* Who would use it?

People who want beautifully printed music, but don't have time to
learn intricacies of music notation.

 * Why would they use it instead of similar projects?

Within the free software movement, LilyPond is unique: free music
notation software is very scarce, and is either difficult to use,
clumsy or does not give pretty results.

 * Special features/strengths?

Just like LaTeX, the input format is very abstract, and the output is
very elegant.  Additionally, most aspects of the formatting can be
adjusted to taste.

LilyPond also allows very easy integration with TeX: you can write a
paper that mixes fragments of notation with LaTeX.

* Special problems?

Music notation is very complicated. It is much more difficult than
typesetting mathematics which is TeX's forte.  Almost everything in
music notation is a "Special problem".

Generally, the more modern the music is, the more problems it
contains: classical and baroque music like Mozart and Bach should pose
no problems for LilyPond. Romantic music like Brahms and Schumann will
get printed but with some formatting errors.  Twentieth century music
like Schoenberg and Bartok can be very difficult to typeset.

Luckily for most, Pop-music is relatively uncomplicated: it should not
be a problem to print that kind of music.

* Who is working on it?

Jan Nieuwenhuizen and me (Han-Wen Nienhuys) have written most of the
core of the program, but the most elaborate example in the
distribution (a 40 page orchestral score) was contributed by one of
our long-time users.  He is a member of a small band of developers
that contribute small patches.

 * Plans for the close and distant future?

The most concrete development plan for now is to use GUILE much more
pervasively: LilyPond started out as a C++ program, with lots of
formatting rules that were hard-wired into the system. We want to
express those rules in Scheme, so that they can be changed at
run-time.

A much more interesting development is The Mutopia Project: it is a
website where you can download sheet music that has passed into the
public domain.  Just think of Project Gutenberg, but then for sheet
music.  We hope that in the future you can just point your browser to
Mutopia if you need classical music.

The Mutopia website has not gone live yet, but you can preview some
scores at http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/. What we need now is lots
of help with entering sheet music.  If you like classical music, come
out and help us!



 * Interesting/fun stories that might juice up the story?

Jan Nieuwenhuizen and me have been best friends for a some four years
now. LilyPond development catalyses our friendship, and our friendship
catalyses LilyPond development. We call each other a few times a week
to discuss development, and the most revolutionary improvements in
Lily have often been the result of a long nights of discussions on
software design over glasses of Whisky

Another question that pops up in outsiders is: ``what do aquatic
flowers have to do with music typography?  Why the weird name?''

I started Lily (our affectionate name for LilyPond) three years
ago. Back then, I was in an amateur symphonic orchestra together with
Jan.  I had a crush on this magnificent girl in the orchestra: her
name was Suzanne, she played both the flute and the cello, and (of
course) I thought she was very pretty.

At the time, Jan was dating Roos (Dutch for `Rose' -- she also played
the cello). I also knew about about a package Rosegarden (a GUI MIDI
sequencer and notation editor).  When I found out that `Susan' is
Hebrew for `lily', I decided that calling the package `LilyPond' would
match make the nomenclature of the rest of my life perfectly.

Some things don't last---the two girls, the cellos and the orchestra,
all have disappeared from our lives.  LilyPond however has survived
over time.  It is a big, mature program with a healthy user-base and
good prospects.  Best of all is, that we still have a good time
hacking on it


* License?!

GPL, of course.

