[edbaskerville]

I used to be big on LilyPond, but in the end I concluded that my musical brain works much more effortlessly when there's an actual graphical score in front of it. (Maybe I'd feel differently if I had one of those keyboardist/composer/jazz brains and/or perfect pitch.) Plug in a MIDI keyboard, learn the shortcuts, and input is fast enough in MuseScore.

There's definitely room for something that bridges the advantages of the different approaches, but it's a difficult problem and it's a $0 billion market, so having passionate people make MuseScore better is probably the best path forward.

[Aidevah]

LilyPond is incredible for the one purpose it's built for: engraving notated music. But music engraving is the usually the very last step of a compositional or editorial process. As such, other methods, even pen and paper, may well be superior tools for the creative process of composition (although we should also remember the testimony of Bach's sons that the elder Bach always composed away from the keyboard, and regarded the inability to compose without an instrument at hand to be evidence of poverty of invention; of course, this does not rule out the possibility that Bach tested out out his draft compositions on a keyboard).

On the editorial side, LilyPond is an incredible tool for creating modern editions of earlier music, specifically music in mensural notation. It comes with common glyphs and has full ligature support, and the separation of content and presentation means that one can reproduce the look of early manuscripts and prints while generating a modern score from the same source file. This has been really great at reducing transcription errors by easing the mental burden of transcription, transposition and note reduction, which can all be handled automatically by LilyPond. It's not perfect, but miles ahead of any alternative.

[viraptor]

> elder Bach always composed away from the keyboard, and regarded the inability to compose without an instrument at hand to be evidence of poverty of invention

What older people on the extreme of some skill think about the skill is not necessarily applicable to 99.9% of us.

[tomcam]

Bach had zero need to “test out” his music at the keyboard. He could hear it perfectly in his head.

[flyinghamster]

Also, there's Frescobaldi, which is essentially an IDE for LilyPond: https://frescobaldi.org/

[tkgally]

After dabbling with LilyPond and MuseScore, I recently started trying out StaffPad for composition:

https://www.staffpad.net/

It requires a tablet and pencil/stylus, and it’s a bit pricey. But I’ve found the handwritten interface, once I got used to it, to be fairly intuitive.

[sogen]

Nice find, does it support drums? For handwriting.

[tkgally]

Yes. You can both write notes for percussion instruments on a staff and apply preset drum patterns and fills. I don’t compose with percussion myself, and I don’t know how the drums and percussion in StaffPad might compare with other programs.

My still-early impression of StaffPad is that it is best for writing scores in a traditional, classical-like format, and detailed knowledge of standard music notation seems to be necessary. It might not be suitable for people who are more comfortable composing with keyboards, rhythm machines, digital audio workstations, etc.

I learned how to write music 50 years ago on paper. Compared to that, this software is a huge advance. Being able to edit scores easily and hear what I write played back is wonderful.

[BigElephant]

I agree with you that a graphical interface works better. All existing sheet music follow this same format. It seems strange that some are trying to go in a vastly different text based approach.