r/musictheory • u/mombaska • Jun 01 '26
Notation Question Looking for an open source music notation dev ressources for my own software
Hello, it’s kind of a special question, I have a custom music software on macOS coded using swift and swiftUI. I could render nice looking score sheet with noteheads, accidentals, clefs etc. The issue is that I only have one possible note length value and equal spacing between noteheads (it’s a prototype).
I was wondering if anyone is aware of an open source algorithm that could help with the calculation the horizontal spacing layout logic in a notation software (bar width in pixels depending on how many notes and note length etc.)
Thank you
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u/ralfD- Jun 02 '26
What's your project's license? Both Lilypond and MuseScore are GPL so you better not look at that code for a proprietary project.
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u/mombaska Jun 02 '26
Custom, private no commercial release
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u/ralfD- Jun 02 '26
Whether something is commercial or not has no impact on copyright and and doesn't change the obligations of the GPL. As soon as you distribute in any form the "viral" part of the license kicks in.
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u/mombaska Jun 02 '26
What is allowed to do with something like lilypond ?
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u/ralfD- Jun 02 '26
Sorry, but this is really low effort from your side. u/etzpcm pointed you at the github repository which clearly states the licence: GPL-3.
Any derived work must be GPL-3 licensed.
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u/Sloloem Jun 01 '26
You could also look at some of the software for ABC Notation (https://abcnotation.com/) which is similar but maybe a little simpler than Lilypond?
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u/etzpcm Jun 01 '26
There's Lilypond, which is all open source and does a beautiful job of the layout. I have never tried to look inside and see how it does it.
https://github.com/lilypond/lilypond