Frescobaldi

About

Frescobaldi is a LilyPond sheet music text editor designed to be powerful yet lightweight and easy to use. It is free software released under the General Public License, and it runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows. Its editing tools include syntax highlighting and automatic completion, a music view with Point & Click, a MIDI player for proof-listening to LilyPond-generated MIDI files, and MIDI capturing for entering music. It also provides a Score Wizard for quickly setting up a score, a Snippet Manager for storing and applying text snippets, templates, or scripts, and support for multiple LilyPond versions, selecting the correct one automatically.

For working with music, Frescobaldi can transpose music, switch between relative and absolute pitch, change the language used for note names, and alter rhythms (doubling, halving, adding or removing dots, copy and paste). Lyrics can be hyphenated using word-processor hyphenation dictionaries, and spanners, dynamics, and articulations can be added through the Quick Insert panel. It can also import MusicXML, MIDI, and ABC files, update LilyPond syntax with convert-ly while showing the differences, and includes a built-in LilyPond documentation browser and User Guide.

The interface is modern, with configurable colors, fonts, and keyboard shortcuts, and the application is translated into a wide range of languages, including Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Polish. The name honors Girolamo Frescobaldi, an Italian composer of keyboard music from the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods.