In my experience, Lilypond and Frescobaldi are both easier to install than ever onto current Mac systems. The problem with Lilypond finding fonts on Macs seems to have been fixed. I've run into a mild peculiarity with launching Frescobaldi on my Mac, but that seems also to have been fixed in the latest iteration.
If you have not tried with your current Mac, I would suggest downloading and installing the current Lilypond and Frescobaldi. Put the font you want to use in the regular font folder. You will need to remember to run the update script in Lilypond on your files so that the syntax is corrected to current standards. Lilypond is, to me, startlingly fast now on Macs compared to say 10 years ago (maybe that's true on Windows and Linux as well, but I've got very little experience with Windows and limited experience with Linux). I don't understand what optimization has gone in to the Lilypond and Frescobaldi code behind the scenes, having no coding skills of my own, but the improvements from the end user perspective are dramatic. Updates are being brought out with impressive regularity and the helpfulness of the user group and developers is second to none. Personally, I'd rather mess around with installing on a Mac than trying to figure out how to use a Windows computer. About 10 years ago my workplace gave me a Windows laptop and for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to do anything efficiently; I gave it back to them and bought a dedicated Mac laptop for work because I was twice as productive with that. Installing and running Kubuntu on my old MacBook Air is much easier than try trying to learn to use Windows, IME. HTH! > On Jul 21, 2025, at 1:58 PM, Robert Schmaus via LilyPond user discussion > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Dear Lilypond community, > > I have a strange question (if one could call it a question at all). > I've been using Lilypond in the past quite intensively to write Jazz Music - > mainly lead sheets and bigband scores. Also (for those who remember) I took > part in Urs Liska's "Das Trunkne Lied" Project. Now I haven't used Lilypond > in years. > > I'm a Mac user, and I always found it hard to upgrade Lilypond to a new > version. As a rule I would stick to an old version as long as I possibly > could because upgrading it was ... not exactly straightforward. I know, that > might partly have been the case, because I used the program in a wrong way, I > don't know. But it wasn't just getting the new version, there was always the > issue of copying the font files for the jazz font somewhere to the right > folders and stuff like that. > > As for editors, I used Frescobaldi, and that too doesn't run well on a mac. > My current version is 3.1.3, and at least that one is still opening. I don't > really dare trying to install a new one. Again, it always was a lot trying to > find out what extra programs (ghostview? poppler? python?) in which version > I'd have to install until I finally got it running. > > I know that some folks on this list might find this strange, but in > particular as someone who creates software as a profession, I actually have > no interest in having to administer and tinker with my computer at home too. > I would simply like to concentrate on the music. And I love to use LaTeX, so > Lilypond is just perfect for me :-) But because my old Lilypond version > stopped working after a system upgrade, I put upgrading off ... for some > years now. Simply stopped using lilypond, because I couldn't face doing that > upgrade again. > > So I guess my questions are this: Would I be better off, using Lilypond and > Frescobaldi on a Windows machine? My hope is: For Windows, you get some .exe > files that already contain everything. No need to check what python or > whatever needs to be installed. Also, in particular in case of Frescobaldi, > sometimes the available Windows versions were of higher version number that > the available Mac version. > > BTW, I'm using MacOS 15.5 on an iMac. > > Best, > Robert > > > >
