lilyseed

Command-line tools for creating and building Lilypond music engraving projects

Background

Lilypond is free software from the GNU Project that produces beautiful sheet music from plain-text source files.

While very little source text is needed to get started, music of any size requires a thoughtful organization of file layout and contents, very similar to any non-trivial software project. As a long-time software developer, this project is the result of developing what I wished was available to me when I first started using Lilypond.

I explored a number of different way of organizing my Lilypond projects, cribbing hints and tips from a number of sources. Things finally fell into place for me when I became aware of long-time Lilypond user Allen Garvin's GitHub Lilypond repository, and his work inspires mine.

Overview

lilyseed offers:

• templates of multiple types of scores
• generation of project skeletons from a template
• automated builds using Makefiles
• automated dependency list generation
• automated listing of references to \incude files

Installation

git clone ssh://[email protected]/mredivo/lilyseed lilyseed

You will probably want to add the bin/ directory to your $PATH.

Setup and Configuration

lilyseed expects to find all Lilypond projects in subdirectories of a directory called src/ in its own root directory. If it doesn't already exist, lilyseed will create it the first time you run bin/new-from-template.sh.

Every immediate subdirectory of src/ whose name starts with an uppercase letter is considered a Category for the purpose of generating new project skeletons. If src/ doesn't exist the first time bin/new-from-template.sh is run, it will also populate it with some categories:

• Piano
• Choir
• Medieval
• Renaissance
• Baroque
• Classical
• Modern

Each of these categories can have its own template files for project skeleton generation (See: templates/ directory).

Creating your first Lilypond project with lilyseed

Run bin/new-from-template.sh to create a project demo-score in the Modern category, which will:

• perform all first-time setup
• create directories and copy template files into them
• build the new Lilypond project, producing
  • a PDF of the score
  • a MIDI file

The command, and its output:

lilyseed$ new-from-template.sh Modern demo-score
Creating new project for opus demo-score in "src/Modern/demo-score"
    /book
    /content
    /output
    /include --> ../../include
    copying files
Makefile:73: deps.mk: No such file or directory
bin/generate-dependencies.sh ./book
Generating dependencies for "./book/demo-score-0-score.ly"
Engraving output/demo-score-0-score.pdf
lilypond \
		--output=./output \
		-ddelete-intermediate-files \
		-dno-point-and-click \
		--loglevel=PROGRESS \
		--pdf \
		 -dmidi  \
		book/demo-score-0-score.ly
GNU LilyPond 2.24.2 (running Guile 3.0)
warning: no such internal option: midi
Processing `book/demo-score-0-score.ly'
Success: compilation successfully completed
Done.

The following project files are created:

src/Modern/demo-score/Makefile
src/Modern/demo-score/book/demo-score-0-score.ly
src/Modern/demo-score/content/piece_001.ily
src/Modern/demo-score/deps.mk
src/Modern/demo-score/distribution-header.ily
src/Modern/demo-score/include
src/Modern/demo-score/output/demo-score-0-score.midi
src/Modern/demo-score/output/demo-score-0-score.pdf
src/Modern/demo-score/referenced-includes.txt

The generated PDF: demo-score-0-score.pdf

One-time Customization

Now is the time to do the one-time personalizing of the configuration in src/site-parameters.ily. In here, you can:

• choose your default paper size (US Letter or A4)
• Enter your copyright information (which prints on the first page of your score)
• choose a customized tagline (which prints on the last page of your score)

Customization for each Project

distribution-header.ily contains the title, composer, opus, and other such information to be printed as heading matter. This should of course be edited for each new project.

Rebuilding your project

Make some changes to distribution-header.ily. To rebuild the project from the command line, go to the src/Modern/demo-score directory, and type make:

demo-score$ make
Engraving output/demo-score-0-score.pdf
lilypond \
		--output=./output \
		-ddelete-intermediate-files \
		-dno-point-and-click \
		--loglevel=PROGRESS \
		--pdf \
		   \
		book/demo-score-0-score.ly
GNU LilyPond 2.24.2 (running Guile 3.0)
Processing `book/demo-score-0-score.ly'
Success: compilation successfully completed

Examine the PDF in output/, and see your changes.

Adding files to your project

If your projects were to consist of only two source files, you wouldn't need any tools to manage them. So once you add another file to your project and \include it, you will need to ensure Make is aware that the project should be rebuilt if that file changes. Execute the following:

make deps

Now Make will rebuild your project if the new file is changed.

Cleaning up the demo project

Once you are done with project demo-score, it can simply be removed with:

rm -f src/Modern/demo-score

This will remove all traces of the project, without any collateral damage.

Frescobaldi

The Frescobaldi project offers a LilyPond sheet music text editor. It offers powerful features, such as being able to click on a note in the PDF of the score to move your cursor to that point in your music file.

Nothing in lilyseed interferes with Frescobaldi in any way. I do my much of my editing in Frescobaldi, and then generate my final PDFs with lilyseed.

Further Reading

See the docs/ directory for more documentation.