GNU LilyPond is a computer program for music engraving. One of LilyPond's major goals is to produce scores that are engraved with traditional layout rules, reflecting the era when scores were engraved by hand.
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Denemo is a music notation program for Linux that helps you quickly prepare notation for publishing with LilyPond. Denemo does NOT strive to display all notation graphically or be the most complete graphic environment. Denemo is a front-end to LilyPond. If you are looking for a WYSIWYG editor Denemo may not be for you. If you are looking for a way to quickly prepare scores for final editing in LilyPond give Denemo a whirl.
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NoteEdit is a music scorewriter for Linux and other Unix-like computer operating systems.
It can function as a notation-based GUI for MIDI composers and as a score preparation utility for a variety of output targets.
CMN (Common Music Notation) is a free western music notation package written in Common Lisp.
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MuseScore is a music scorewriter for Linux and Microsoft Windows. MuseScore is a WYSIWYG editor, complete with support for score playback and import/export of MusicXML and standard MIDI files. Percussion notation is supported, as is direct printing from the program.
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Rosegarden is an integrated audio/MIDI sequencer with a variety of user interfaces, including an excellent notation-based GUI. Rosegarden's support for standard notation was an essential aspect of the program's original design. LilyPond export capability appeared with Rosegarden.
Rosegarden is a free software digital audio workstation program developed for Linux with ALSA and KDE. It acts as an audio and MIDI sequencer, scorewriter and musical composition and editing tool. It is intended to be a free replacement for such applications as Cubase.
Rosegarden does not provide a built-in software synthesizer, so it requires a hardware MIDI synthesizer, a soft synthesizer such as FluidSynth or TiMidity++, or a synthesizer plugin in order to make any sound from MIDI compositions. Recent versions of Rosegarden support the DSSI software synthesizer plugin interface, and can use some Windows VST plugins through an adapter.
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TuxGuitar is a free score writer and midi sequencer written in Java and released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License similar to the commercial Guitar Pro. It is intented to help guitarists writeeditplaymanage songs transcription in the form of tablatures or scores. It has its own file format but, in addition, can also importexport fromto Guitar Pro proprietary file format, import Power Tab and TablEdit tabulatures, and export tabulatures as LilyPond scores.
It also supports exporting as ASCII tabulatures, MusicXML and Adobe PDFs, and loading and exporting MIDI files.
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MusE is a MIDI/Audio sequencer with recording and editing capabilities written by Werner Schweer. MusE aims to be a complete multitrack virtual studio for Linux: it currently has no support under other platforms as it relies on Linux-only technologies, including JACK and ALSA.
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FluidSynth, formerly known as iiwusynth, is a free open source program which synthesizes using SoundFont technology without need for a SoundFont-compatible soundcard, and the size of loaded SoundFont banks is limited by the amount of RAM available. There is a GUI for FluidSynth called Qsynth which is also open source. Both are available in most Linux distributions; compiling them for Windows is also possible.
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Seq24 is a software MIDI music sequencer that runs under Linux and Microsoft Windows. It is designed to be simple to use and appropriate for live performance.
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TiMidity++, originally and still frequently informally called TiMidity, is a software synthesizer that can play MIDI files without a hardware synthesizer.
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Free cross-platform music creation software.