This is what users said about LilyPond in e-mails and newsgroup postings.

2003

Before I tell you my problem, I want to thank you for creating what appears to be a wonderful application. The examples of LilyPond that I've seen are very clean and elegant, and I wish you all the best in continuing to develop and propagate it. :)

Richard Benedict

2002

I hope I am not imposing to send a message to this address. I wanted to send a heart-felt thank-you for all of the time and effort you have put into LilyPond and for your support of the free software movement. I'm new to western music notation (I'm a taiko artist/performer, just back from Japan) but am trying to learn how to read and write for my own compositions. I was sure that this would be tricky under Linux but was excited to see LilyPond listed at CCRMA's list of software. I was even more excited to see how effortlessly it installed (using Fernando Lopez-Lescano's apt-get for rpm how-to) and how intuitive the program is. Once I get the hang of things, I forsee LilyPond being an important part of my Linux experience.

Thank you so much and I hope this message finds everyone well.

Kris Bergstrom

... hi I was just looking around for some Linux software to typeset the music to a Christmas song I am writing and came across LilyPond. I was flabberghasted w/ the apparent quality of the software and I'm looking forward to using it.

wow!

John Hinsdale

So far I'm very impressed with this software. I've been using a mixture of Cakewalk and Finale for several years to do this type of work, but I've always found them to be ackward to do a complete printout of my compositions and arrangements.

Kirk Howe

Lilypond is great.

Ruven Gottlieb

P.S.: I know it must become booooring after a while but... Best typeset I've seen so far, I've tried commercial products and they do not come close; I know I showed many samples to my friends (musicians, classical) I do not tell them anything, I present them with several copies of the same music, and they always prefer lilypond's... thanks for the extra miles in quality. 

    Daniel C%/1€Œiso8859-15ôt%/1€Œiso8859-15é

Anyway, all working now, and it's a great program...

Rachel Willmer

Thanks for a great program. It's great to feel that the only bugs I can find are as irrelevant as these :-)

Erik Sandberg

Thanks for Lilypond. ..? I was amazed at what MusicTeX could do, but I am a hundred times more amazed at Lilypond :).

Karl Berry

Anyway, LilyPond does an amazingly good job -- and the input files are

is terrific! After we have proper ottava line support, the file size will shrink again by a few kBytes.

Werner Lemberg

I just found out about lilypond and am having a blast using it. It cracks me up that I'm dvipsing music ( instead of physics papers! ). Thanks for the great work! 

   lance mclean

This is actually quite a good program, particualy for creating books with inline music.

Joel Mayes

Great Job Guys, really COOL!!!! ..? Its my second experience with lilypond (I have to admit. I like it better than Finale! I hated having to switch for Windows to edit parts and scores!. . . . EEEEK!)

Fabio

I've just started to play around with 1.5 series and I must say I'm impressed. The output looks much nicer (..) and the memory consumption is almost twice less.

(Vassily Checkin)

I am truly grateful for your help. I've been looking forward to using Lilypond and so far it is working and I'm thrilled.

(Deborah Lowrey)

I've been using LilyPond for several months now and am really impressed. I've been able to do far more powerful things getting music typeset with LilyPond than any other system that I've tried. Having been an emacs user for 20 years, having an emacs mode is particularly cool.

(Richard Schoeller)

If you ever come to Finland, or if I ever happen to come to Utrecht, I'll buy you n items of $BEVERAGE of your choice. I'm _so_ pleased to not have to work with Finale ever again.

(Atro Tossavainen)

I want to complement you and the other writers of lilypond. Lilypond produces beautiful high quality notation.

Howard Selover

[..] at first glance it seems horrible -- writing music in text? Too hard to learn! Too hard to read! etc. But it takes a surprisingly small amount of time to get used to it; particularily if you have a little bit of programming experience. It really rocks. Writing "c8 d e f g a b c" is much faster than clicking on an eight note icon, then clicking on each line and space on a staff.

And the output is _beautiful_.

(Musashi Dragon)

2001

Maury (who's delighted by LilyPond and can now actually produce legible music!)

(Maury Merkin)

I've just started using Lilypond, and have to say that I was very impressed.

(Phillip Lord)

Just discovered lilypond. It's great, thanks for making it.

(David Creelman)

I am using lilypond to typset choir music, and it is really easy and the output is stunning!

(Martin Norb?ck)

Lilypond is a music typsetting program. On the downside, it has the proverbial steep learning cliff^h^h^h^h^h^h curve [...]. On the plus side, if you're willing to futz with it long enough you can make sheet music that looks exactly the way you want.

(Rich Brown)

So much more comfortable to use than point and click editors (ie: Sibelius, Encore, etc.) and getting even more powerfull, Lilypond is making music-typing as easy on computers, than is word-typing. Since I'm using it, I'm in heaven.

(J%/1€Œiso8859-15ér%/1€Œiso8859-15émie Lumbroso)

Keep up the good work. Lilypond is fantastic!

(Ian Bailey-Mortimer)

Other than these two minor issues, I've found lilypond to be an excellent piece of software. Thankyou all lilypond developers!

(David Symonds)

Thank you all for writing such a quality piece of software. I love it!

(Tim Nowaczyk)

... simply because This Does What I Wanted: makes printed music (yes, beautiful printed music!) without that darned mouse!!

(William `raybro' Brohin)

I'm impressed! Lilypond is getting better all the time, and the documentation is really good.

Great job!

(EagleIce?)

Meanwhile, LilyPond really produces beautiful sheet music!

(J. David Blackstone)

This is so much faster and easier than with wysiwyg music editors, and the results are easier to read and much easier to manipulate.

(William R. Brohinksy)

Many thanks to everybody involved in the development of lilypond-1.4 , for the great work (s)he has done and that it is freely available.

Working formerly with lilypond-1.2.17 , I really appreciate the new features

(Leon Kirsch)

BTW, I am _really_ impressed with the progress LilyPond has made. LilyPond 1.4.1 is _really_ pretty, and mighty powerful too! Thanks for all your hard work!

(Anthony Fok -- Debian maintainer for LilyPond)

So far I've been impressed by Lily's ability to work out the right way to do most things. And the fact that when it does get something wrong, I can usually figure out how to override it.

(Peter Samuelson)

Thanks for producing such a great piece of software! Keep up the good work!

(Michael Brown)

Am Anfang scheint dass sehr kompliziert, wenn man das aber erstmal begriffen hat, geht das sehr einfach.

(Andreas Mueller)

De #1 op dit gebied is Lilypond (http://www.lilypond.org). Het is wel even wennen aan de manier van werken maar als het resultaat telt...

(Johan Schoone)

lilypond produces great sheet music, and I didn't have any software which would do this (well, Cakewalk, but that doesn't count -- it's a MIDI program with rudimentary sheet output).

(Tim Nelson)

Thanks to the authors for this great tool!

(Joachim Miltz)

Thanks for all your great work on lilypond!

(David Roundy)

I think lily is great. I've just typeset an arrangement of "Summertime" using that modified chord- names.scm, and it's looking sweet.

(Gavin Band)

you're doing a great job--lily has come a long way towards usability for people like me who do lead sheets! Thanks!

(Shamus)

Many thanks for the continuing development on a very useful program, and one which produces increasingly beautiful output!

(Chris Sawer -- Mutopia project leader)

Lilypond gets better and better --- it really looks great and it's a pleasure to play from a lilypond typeset part!

...

Thanks again you guys, for doing such outstanding work.

(Scott Ballantyne)

I have just installed Lilypond. The examples look beautiful.

Sebastian Danicic

I must say I am really in awe on lily's recent beautiful drawing of slurs and ties.

(Dirk Latterman)

Thanks for providing a program that produces such beautiful output.

(Campo Weijerman)

I'm new to Lilypond, and to this list. Lily is a wonderful music typesetter. In just a few short weeks, I've fallen in love. Congratulations to the developers.

Overall, from the point of view of a user, lily's concept is miles ahead of the competition. The syntax is easy to master, and provides the kind of precise control a serious musician needs. Well, mostly. :) She makes pretty intelligent decisions on her own, and when she doesn't, it's relatively easy to help her out. These things indicate a hefty amount of smarts in her design.

(Peter Schaffter)

I'm using Lilypond to generate scores for Schwyzeroergeli which is a three row diatonic accordion.

...

Thanks for Lilypond anyway. I love it.

(Christian Egli)

i don't think you should hide the fact that using lily well will require study. (but the results are so great, that people will put in the effort.)

(David Petrou)

I've typeset around 40 songs using LilyPond and I'am very satisfied with its layout decisions ...

(Thomas Willhalm)

Thanks for a great tool! ... I have a beautifully typeset piece of music!

(Timothy Dunnington)

At last, I want to thank all the people who are working on this project! You're doing a great work! :-)

(Romaz)

I LOVE LILYPOND!

(Andras Cser)

Thank you so much for everything. I really think Lilypond is a great software! (actually, before I heard of it, I was kind of considering making one of my own, after spending hours trying to do something I couldn't get on Finale 2.0. But now I know that I could never achieve anything even close to Lilypond).

P.P.S: Thanks for writing Lilypond, it's a great great software!

(Simon Adda-Reyss)

2000

Thanks! I really appreciate the wonderful work and any help you can offer. I look forward to contributing some scores to Mutopia soon!

(Benjamin B. Thomas)

I just want to compliment you on your project, which I think is wonderful. I am especially awed by your process and the sheer ambition of your effort.

I downloaded Jeff Covey's rendering of the Milan Pavan 2 from Mutopia this morning to give to students. The overall appearance of it is just wonderful.

(David Raleigh Arnold)

thank you very much, I have been advocating the advantages of open source community since I have been using Linux, Zope & python for the last 8 months (ok so I'm a newbie really). This is one thing I have been trying to get across to people about the quick response to fixes etc </end>.

I will let you know how it works out. Thanks again and have a fantastic day.

(Steve Nicholson (UK) on behalf of Dave Nicholson (NZ))

thanks very much for this fantastic software that is Lilypond.

(Alain CULOS)

Thanks, I appreciate it. Also, thank you for putting so much work into this project. It's great. It's actually exactly what I'm looking for in a Music notation program.

(Carl McTague?)

BTW: The lilypond output looks very beautiful! I export MusiXTeX, PMX and LilyPond. But LilyPond is certainly the best! Especially the font selection is a very useful feature. We had Linux Day last weekend and I presented "noteedit". There were also some musicians and one important question was: "How can I change the font?". This was one of the reasons for me to perform the LilyPond export.

(Joerg Anders -- Main author of Noteedit)

I did it, and a beautiful sheet of music came out

(Daniel Senderowicz)

is it a long piece? I'd be willing to re-typeset it using the `lilypond' music typesetting software. That produces beautiful postscript output (and midi files as well) from a sort of musical language.

(Sebastian Brosig)

I've used the Gnu LilyPond typesetter. You type your scores in an ascii representation. Once you get the hang of it it is quite fast.

It is really quite good at typesetting traditional music. It is quite clever about note spacing etc. It is not to hard to use the same file with different headers to generate parts and the score.

(Justin Pearson)

What are you using? If you can be arsed with Linux, then Lilypond, which is free software, is incredibly quick once you take the time to learn it's language, which is a little like Postscript. I find now I'm practised I can type in some songs in not much more time than it takes to play them! It's also available for Windows

(Philip Blandford)

I have used it extensively (along with other TeX based typestting systems) and have found it to be first-rate.

(Daniel Robert Franklin)

You can try GNU LilyPond for Linux. It is not WYSIWYG program. If you have experience writing Latex or HTML files, you can write any piece of music. The software is really powerful once you get used to it.

(Pawan)

1999

Hello everyone and thank you for an outstanding piece of software!

(Fredrik Sandstrom)

I am discovering LilyPond - it looks great!

(Johannes Baagoe)

I'm a new user of LilyPond, and I wish to thank everyone for this impressive piece of software.

(Emanuele Pucciarelli)

congratulations to the developers - it's a great piece of work.

(Dr John Yesberg)

Just a few ideas, perhaps thus helping to make a great piece of software still a little bit better...

(Juergen Reuter)

1998

Thanks for this great package; I'm not a musician -- but I like to view nicely printed music books and I'm pretty sure, my brother, who's a singer, will enjoy LilyPond.

(Karl Eichwalder)

A other thing : Lily is beautiful. Thanks to the developpers.

(Gilles Lamiral)

Jan, Han-Wen, contributers: great software.

(Rich Brown)

By the way, so far I am *greatly* impressed with what I have seen, especially the Bach praeludium-fuga-E.ps.gz file on the website.

(David R. Conrad)

I'm following the LilyPond efforts and success with interest. If I had more time, I would probably be an active participant and developer there. I'm not pushing nor pulling on LilyPond, as the guys do a great job.

It is absolutely excellent in its niche, Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen make a very good team to produce high-quality scores, they also use software engineering which is a bit unusual to GNU, and worth its own originality.

(François Pinard)

The output from the examples looks very nice, I'm looking forward to investigating this very promising software. Thanks a lot too all who have contributed to it.

I've been experimenting with lilypond. Very impressive.

(Scott Ballantyne)

Thanks a lot. (Jaume Obrador)

Since yesterday I am using lilypond, and I must say that I am already a fan of it (although the syntax sometimes seems a bit odd to me). Not only that high-quality output, but also a midi-file is generated at once, that's increadible !

(Kai Schuetz)

Hi. I found lilypond on the net a few days ago, it is a *fantastic* piece of work. Thanks! I had tried musixtex, but lilypond is much more user-friendly.

(Joseph H. Buehler)

/

So I downloaded, compiled and installed Lilypond last night, and it looks very nice!

(Chris Colohan)

Thanks for all the good work so far on Lilypond.

(Peter Chubb)

1997

Thank you for your great effort

(Roland Meier)

thanks so much!

(Jeff Covey)

thank your very much for your kind answer to my question about lilypond. In the meantime I have inverstigated a little bit further in lilypond and are more and more enthusiastic about it.

(Lars Schmidt-Thieme)

I am really excited about your software.

(John Galbraith)

I found LilyPond last weekend but long before then I had a system for pop music with MusiXTeX and was in process of writing a preprocessor in Scheme. It had nice output, could transpose notes and chord-names but the input was tedious. Now I consider that LilyPond has much more to offer so the Scheme stuff is on the back burner.

(Barrie Stott)

But, immedately, i must say... i forgot how nice lily looks, in terms of her engravings... that treble clef looks sweet :)

(Derek Wyatt)