Best Music Notation Software for Linux

Denemo is a free music notation program for GNU/Linux, Mac OSX and Windows that lets you rapidly enter notation which it typesets using the LilyPond music engraver. Music can be typed in at the PC-Keyboard, or played in via MIDI controller, or input acoustically into a microphone plugged into your computer’s soundcard. Denemo uses LilyPond which generates beautiful sheet music to the highest publishing standards. During input Denemo displays the staffs in a simple fashion, so you can enter and edit the music efficiently. The typesetting is done in the background while you work, and is generally flawless publication quality. Some final tweaks can be done on the typeset score with the mouse if needed. This represents an enormous practical improvement over the popular programs which require you to re-position colliding notation constantly as you enter the music. See comparison with Musescore, Finale or Sibelius.

MC Musiceditor is free/open source (GPLv2 or above) music notation software. The two flavours, MCMusiceditor (full version) and MCMusiceditor-Lite, are made for Windows (XP and above). In addition, MCMusiceditor-Lite runs also fine on Linux (under Wine). MC Musiceditor is developed by Reinier Maliepaard, psychologist, software engineer, musician and teacher at the ArtEZ Conservatorium Netherlands (music theory and music history). Why? To make life of musicians easier when making scores. This resulted in a userfriendly editor which makes professional scores without requiring specific knowledge (other than musical basics)! MC Musiceditor is the easiest way to write, refine, hear and print professional scores. In addition: MC Musiceditor can share and interchange musical notation data of MC Musiceditor with WYSIWYG music notation editors like MuseScore, Finale and Sibelius (to mention only the most popular programs by my students).

LilyPond is a music engraving program, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. It brings the aesthetics of traditionally engraved music to computer printouts. LilyPond is free software and part of the GNU Project. LilyPond is a powerful and flexible tool for engraving tasks of all kinds, for example classical music, complex notation, early music, modern music, tablature, vocal music, lead sheets, educational materials, large orchestral projects, customized output, and even Schenker graphs. LilyPond came about when two musicians wanted to go beyond the soulless look of computer-printed sheet music. Musicians prefer reading beautiful music, so why couldn’t programmers write software to produce elegant printed parts? The result is a program that creates beautiful sheet music following the best traditions of classical music engraving. It takes care of the details of layout programmatically, allowing composers, transcribers and publishers to focus on the music.