LilyPond Portable

Music creation is nowadays less of an activity which requires the use of actual instruments, but this doesn’t make your guitar obsolete. A musician still needs to know his way around a scale and notes, and even write and print his own music. If you’re also fond of computer code, you might want to use LilyPond Portable to write and print music.

As the name clearly points it out, this is the edition of LilyPond which doesn’t bind itself to your computer, so you can just as well have it deployed on a USB flash drive. This allows you to use it on other computers, without having to worry that something wrong happens, because registry entries are not altered in the process.

You might end up scratching your head for a while at first, but the application has it well under control. Launching it directly brings up a set of instructions on how writing needs to be done, as well as what it takes to get a hold of the actual music paper from your printer. In fact, the application doesn’t even have its own interface.

Not that the application is completely devoid of a visual structure, but it’s merely a simple text editor. This isn’t really an inconvenience, because it saves you the effort of finding a suitable editor for your compositions. These come in the form of text, but need to be exported under the LY format for conversion to a music sheet to be properly performed.

Writing your music can take quite a while, at least until you get the hang of it. On the bright side of things, the application comes with a decent set and variety of samples and tutorials to get you up and running. When your file is created and properly saved, all it takes to get it in a pretty and printable form is to drop it over the program executable. A printable PDF is instantly generated.

Taking everything into consideration, we can state that LilyPond Portable might make you have second thoughts at first, at least because of the lack of a pretty interface to attract your attention. Despite all this, the result is always accurate, and designed in such a form that any printer can clearly deliver your compositions on a sheet of paper.