openbook VS csound

I'm greatly thankful for the hard work put into lilypond and frescobaldi.

I use lilypond to type up leadsheets for jazz and some other genres [0], inspired by Mark Veltzer's Openbook [1]. I've gotten pretty fast at typing up songs over time. The goal is to have a CLI or web interface to generate a pdf for concert/bb/bass clef/etc, optionally include lyrics, and so on.

Being able to transpose is quite handy, although I'm working on a system to automatically handle larger transpositions (e.g. for Eb instruments or for bass clef). The problem is if I statically pick one direction (up or down), some leadsheets will have the notes too high or low. I think I can resolve it with having all songs entered in absolute pitches and scanning for the lowest/highest note.

0: https://github.com/andrewzah/openbook-dev

1: https://github.com/veltzer/openbook

Nobody has mentioned Csound.

Thank you so much for your appreciation ! I'm planning a blog post abou that... but, meanwhile: I use the following free software: 1) Huygens Fokker Scala to tune files (see below which ones); 2) SynthFont (in combination with soundfonts) to play the files tuned by Scala; The files in 1) are text files essentially representing pitches and durations. I set them up by means of an electronic spreadsheet :) Here's a link to Huygens Fokker Scala: http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/ The underlying logic is definitely an "abc" one, rather than WYSIWYG. I'm still working under Windows, but I'm trying to switch to Linux, so I could need to replace Scala (which still doesn't install smoothly on recent distros) by Csound: https://csound.com/ 🙂 (Scala doesn't install smoothly on recent Linux distros).

Pure Data, cSound, and SuperCollider are all free and opensource. Incredible possibility, though the learning curb can be steep.

For fun, I took a class in computer music. I still did not know what a synthesizer was. Once class got under way, we started using this archaic horrible piece of software, Csound. Not long into the class, it finally kind of dawned on me that synths exist, what they are and how they work, and I started buying gear. Once I had gear, I really really hated Csound, and I wound up dropping the class (Covid had something to do with that). A lot of things started to make sense (Regular Show, for instance) and I got really interested in sound design.

CSound looks interesting: https://csound.com

csound would be interesting to play with.