Wanted: open-source, cross-platform music notation

[mdlbear]

What I'm looking for is an open-source, cross-platform (Linux, Windows, and preferably also MacOS) program for music notation. Preferably with the ability to export to Lilypond (for typesetting), ABC, and MusicXML. Must import and export MIDI files and play via MIDI. Rosegarden would be absolutely ideal, except that it only runs on Linux (for a change).

Canorus looks plausible, but appears to be immature at this point. Definitely worth a try, though, since there are Windows binaries on the download page. It's based on the earlier Noteedit, which is Linux-only again.

Of course, we could always use VMWare and either run Lilypond on Windows, or a pirated version of Concertware on Linux. The latter is ancient, though, and stuck with proprietary formats.

Comments

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

FWIW, Concertware will no longer run on Macs. Even pre-Intel Macs. I switched to Finale PrintMusic--the Notepad version of Finale is free, but limited, there are versions for Mac and PC that can talk to each other (don't know about Linux) but I suspect it's not open source.

[mdlbear]

None of the Finale versions run on Linux as far as I know. Definitely not open source, and I'm not sure about import/export file formats, especially on Notepad. We're operating on a shoestring at the moment, so free is a requirement.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Dude. Think about it. You really want Rosegarden. You're willing to load VMware, which runs on all your platforms. There is a version of Ubuntu specifically tailored for running under VMware. No reason you have to run anything other than what you really want...

(BTW, there seems to be a version of Lilypond that's Windows-native on the download page, if VMware for that program isn't fast enough... )

[brmj.livejournal.com]

That is probably the way I would do it. It looks like rosegarden relies on too much GNU/Linux specific stuff to be easy to port to OS X, but that might be possible. I would imagine you would have about as much or more trouble getting it to work with cygwin. A virtual machine sounds like the best option, unless you need better performance than that.

[mdlbear]

Performance(1) probably won't be a problem unless one of the Windows users wanted to play MIDI in a performance(2); should be OK for proofing the data-entry.

Don't know how good VMWare's USB/MIDI implementation is.

[phillip2637.livejournal.com]

I don't know the details of this package, but it fits some of your criteria at least:
http://musescore.org/

There seems to exist a musicXML -> Lilypond option:
http://www.nongnu.org/xml2ly/

(Doesn't seem to do ABC. Rats!)

[mdlbear]

Thanks! No Mac support, but we don't really need that at the moment. Though I should get around to installing Ubuntu on the work laptop...