[tekkk]

Pretty sweet, I'll just have to learn that LilyPond to make use of it. Is there any good resources out there? It would be nice to include some tutorials or example songs but well that's a minor issue.

To me learning through programming is very natural so I'm excited to try my hands on composing using this language. Didn't ever occur to me that the notation would be that simple. With same effort and time you put into learning say C++ could you become a proficient composer with this?

[jnetterf]

I think the LilyPond documentation (http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/learning/index) is a pretty good way of learning LilyPond. It's linked to from "menu > LilyPond manual" within Hacklily. Maybe I should be more aggressive about highlighting that...

Making community features is a natural next step which might help with finding examples.

LilyPond has a bit of a steep learning curve, but you can absolutely use it professionally. http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ shows what LilyPond can do. Personally, I find that I can be more productive with LilyPond than with Finale, and that the results look better.

[gooseyard]

I've been using Musescore for a lot of the stuff I used to use Lilypond for, but one of the things I absolutely love about Lilypond is that its easy to write scripts that emit lilypond format, it's killer for repetitive stuff like examples, flash cards, etc.

I was never any good with Finale or Sibelius, so I feel like I'm unqualified to say whether Musescore is worth learning, but have been curious what an actual skilled Finale user thinks about it?

[jadavies]

+1 for the Lilypond documentation. It's very informative.

I use Frescobaldi ( http://frescobaldi.org ) for my Lilypond editing and find it pretty good.