On Mon, 14 Oct 2019, Lisa C Lewis wrote: > It appears that LilyPond only creates MIDI output. Given that I need to > share the audio with other people who may not have MIDI players, is > there a means of generating MP3 files? If not, what do folks recommend > for converting MIDI to MP3? I've looked through the documentation, but > if it's in there I missed it.
Creating MP3, or any digital-audio format, requires synthesizing the actual sounds of the notes. It's far outside the scope of what a music notation program does and no surprise Lilypond doesn't do it; Lilypond isn't even good at MIDI, and MIDI is much closer to scope. I usually use TiMidity++ (http://timidity.sourceforge.net/) to synthesize WAV files from Lilypond MIDI output, then LAME to encode the WAV files into MP3 (encoding MP3 would usually also be a separate step from the audio synthesis). With this or any software synth, the choice of a library of patches or samples is also quite important - probably more important to the final sound than the synthesis software itself. Most often, I use the "Nordic Upright Piano" soundfont which I licensed from Precisionsound; they appear to be selling it now at https://majesy.com/samples-sounds/nordic-upright-piano-v2-multiformat-krock.html but that wasn't the Web site through which I bought the product several years ago; I don't know the history there. There are free soundfonts available, and other commercial ones for sounds other than piano, but I don't have specific recommendations. -- Matthew Skala msk...@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca People before tribes. https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
