Frescobaldi is an editor for

LilyPond LilyPond is a computer program and file format 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. LilyPond is cross-pla ...

music files. It aims to be powerful, yet lightweight and easy to use. Frescobaldi is

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

, freely available under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

. It is designed to run on all major

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

(

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

). It is named after

Girolamo Frescobaldi Girolamo Alessandro Frescobaldi (; also Gerolamo, Girolimo, and Geronimo Alissandro; September 15831 March 1643) was an Italian composer and virtuoso keyboard player. Born in the Duchy of Ferrara, he was one of the most important composers of ke ...

, an Italian composer of

keyboard music A keyboard instrument is a musical instrument played using a keyboard, a row of levers that are pressed by the fingers. The most common of these are the piano, organ, and various electronic keyboards, including synthesizers and digital pianos. O ...

in the late

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...

and early

Baroque The Baroque ( , , ) is a Western Style (visual arts), style of Baroque architecture, architecture, Baroque music, music, Baroque dance, dance, Baroque painting, painting, Baroque sculpture, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished from ...

period. Frescobaldi is written in Python and uses

PyQt PyQt is a Python binding of the cross-platform GUI toolkit Qt, implemented as a Python plug-in. PyQt is free software developed by the British firm Riverbank Computing. It is available under similar terms to Qt versions older than 4.5; this ...

for its user interface. Its main developer is Wilbert Berendsen.

History

Frescobaldi has its roots in LilyKDE, a plugin for KDE's Kate text editor developed by Berendsen, originally released in 2007.History of Frescobaldi (part of the Frescobaldi user guide)
/ref> It later evolved into a standalone application and was renamed into Frescobaldi in 2008. In 2011, Frescobaldi was rewritten from scratch, leading to Frescobaldi 2.0. The release removed the use of

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma gra ...

libraries in favor of the base PyQt library only. As a result, Frescobaldi became

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

. In 2015, the ly module from the Frescobaldi code base was split into its own project
python-ly
which has since been used independently by other Python projects.python-ly Network Dependents list on GitHub
/ref> Released in 2017, Frescobaldi 3.0 was a port of Frescobaldi 2 to

Python 3 The programming language Python (programming language), Python was conceived in the late 1980s, and its implementation was started in December 1989 by Guido van Rossum at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, CWI in the Netherlands as a successor ...

and Qt 5. In LilyPond 2.24 (released in February 2023), the "LilyPad" editor that was previously shipped officially with LilyPond was discontinued. Instead, the official installation tutorial for LilyPond 2.24 and later guides beginners towards Frescobaldi,Installation tutorial in the LilyPond Learning Manual
/ref> reflecting Frescobaldi's de facto status as the most popular LilyPond editor.

Features

Text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. An example of such program is "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to c ...

with

syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that is used for programming language, programming, scripting language, scripting, or markup language, markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in differe ...

and automatic completion * Music view *

MIDI Musical Instrument Digital Interface (; MIDI) is an American-Japanese technical standard that describes a communication protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, ...

player to proof-listen LilyPond-generated MIDI files * Wizard to quickly set up a new score * Snippet Manager to store and apply text snippets, templates or scripts * Use multiple versions of LilyPond, automatically selects the correct version * Built-in LilyPond documentation browser and built-in help * Configurable colors, fonts and keyboard shortcuts * Translated into the following languages: Czech, Dutch, English, French, Galician, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Turkish

Music functions

Transpose In linear algebra, the transpose of a Matrix (mathematics), matrix is an operator which flips a matrix over its diagonal; that is, it switches the row and column indices of the matrix by producing another matrix, often denoted by (among other ...

music * Change music from relative pitches to absolute and vice versa * Change the language used for note names * Change the

rhythm Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular r ...

(

double Double, The Double or Dubble may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Multiplication by 2 * Double precision, a floating-point representation of numbers that is typically 64 bits in length * A double number of the form x+yj, where j^2=+1 * A ...

, halve, add/remove dots, copy, paste) etc. * Hyphenate lyrics using word-processor hyphenation dictionaries * Add spanners, dynamics, articulations * Update LilyPond syntax using convert-ly, with display of differences

References

External links

* * https://github.com/frescobaldi/frescobaldi LilyPond Scorewriters Free music software Audio software that uses Qt Free software programmed in Python Scorewriters for Linux Software using the GNU General Public License {{free-software-stub

History

Features

Music functions

See also

References

External links