Beta Plugin Available: Music Notation Rendering with Lilypond

Plugins ideas
1

Hi all, this has been discussed a bit before on this thread:

But since that thread was primarily introduced as an ABCjs thread, and there’s a plugin covering that, I thought I’d start a new thread for Lilypond.

I’m at the point where I have a testing version ready for Lilypond. Here’s a quick demo:

LilyPondForObsidian

It’d be great to get anyone who is interested to help test it.

Please do NOT test on a primary vault, or back up your vault before testing. This plugin does do some file cleanup on temp lilypond files so in the case of a bad bug you may lose items.

The way this works is it copies the lilypond you write to a .ly file in your vault, then uses your local lilypond instance to compile the lilypond and output a .png file. That png is then loaded as an image into Obsidian.

I have the dev code in a branch on github here: https://github.com/fuzzbyte/obsidian-lilypond/tree/Initial-Version .

Thanks all!

6 Likes
2

This is huge!! Thank you so much :slight_smile: I’ve linked your thread to https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-for-musicians to be sure we keep up to date on this.

1 Like
3

Wasn’t aware of that thread! I’ll be testing the plugin as I work it into my musical note taking over the next few weeks.

1 Like
4

Cool! Make sure to share the results! I am really excited about the possibility of taking real music notes directly into Obsidian. It will really be a game-changer.

5

That’s awesome. I’m rather new to Obsidian and just started using it more. My first project that I started to track is kind of a mashup between three or four different tracks of one artist. I have separate notes with original poems that were adapted to lyrics for those songs, and then separate note for each original song, describing song structure, tempo, key, key changes, basic chord progressions etc. - all I was lacking was the ability to embed into the notes some musical notation for transcribing parts and licks, and this seems to solve my problem. I know nothing about LilyPond, but it really looks promising. I’ll let you know how it works for me. Thank you for your effort!

6

Great. while I haven’t gotten around to testing across a different platforms and a few other loose ends before submitting a pull request to get this officially in the obsidian plugin list, I did create a release which would make it easier to install/test.

Grab the main.js file and manifest.json file there and stick it in your vault under

<path_to_vault>\.obsidian\plugins\obsidian-lilypond

Enable it in Obsidian and give it a shot.

EDIT: Oh, and do check out the latest docs on how to use it, as there have been some changes since I initially created this thread: GitHub - fuzzbyte/obsidian-lilypond: A lilypond plugin for obsidian.

Again, back up your vault first!

7

Hello

I tried your plugin on my Mac I have an error:

Error: Command failed: lilypond --png -dno-print-pages -dpreview --loglevel=ERROR “1.Prelude_MyScore.ly”
/bin/sh: lilypond: command not found

When I launch my terminal, I have access to lilypond.
But obsidian can’t get access to it ?

Thank you for your help,
Stephane.

8

Hi! I’m new here but I’ve been using obsidian for a while and I’m a composer. I’m looking for better ways to integrate music into obsidian so I would love to test this out.

Best,
Ked

1 Like
9

Hey Ked, you can check out and post any ideas, suggestions and/or questions at Obsidian for Musicians
Really beautiful music btw! Cool to find you here :slightly_smiling_face: