Typesetting music in LaTeX

Question

I would be grateful for any help typesetting music in LaTeX. I've tried to use MusiXTeX but have been very frustrated.

As I understand it, the MusiXTeX notation has a steep learning curve, but I'm OK with that; the notation seems to be well documented. The hardest part is installation and getting a simple "hello world" example to work.

I'm not committed to MusiXTeX; I'll try anything that works with LaTeX. But I've tried other alternatives and been equally frustrated with them.

Answer 1

How about LilyPond? It uses its own plaintext notation, but uses TeX for output. The engine itself uses a whole slew of measures to analyze the music and produce pretty sheet music, so it's automated to a much greater extent than MusixTex is.

Answer 2

Lilypond has a preprocessor called lilypond-book that lets you mix LaTeX code with Lilypond code in one source file.

Sample usage: tsst.lytex contains this:

\documentclass{article} \begin{document} \begin[quote,fragment,staffsize=26]{lilypond} c' d' e' \end{lilypond} \end{document} 

It also supports inline notation (instead of a display), and reading from external files.

Compile it with lilypond-book --pdf tsst.lytex, producing pdf images of each system along with a LaTeX file tsst.tex that includes the snippets, which compiles as usual with pdflatex.