Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Saying Lilypond is hard is like saying wikitext is
hard.
Lilypond is just one step above ABC and much more expressive, anything
else would not be sufficient to produce and maintain a professional
quality score.
I haven't been heavily involved in the open-music community, but I've
attended a few academic computer-music conferences on and off, and the
people I've met are somewhat ambivalent about Lilypond. Basically, the
main complaint is that it's intended to be a music-*presentation*
language (or music *typesetting*), not a music-*representation*
language. This makes it hard to use for a lot of things, like automatic
manipulation, transformation to ther formats, and so on. It also makes
it relatively hard to edit, since you have to specify a lot of the
nitty-gritty presentation details yourself.
Of course, it's a poorly-funded area with only a relatively small body
of interested people working on software, so there aren't many good
replacements. There is one system called GUIDO, that was promising but
still very early the last time I heard about it; it may have a release
by now, but I don't know of it. One problem is that most people who are
interested in this sort of functionality just give in and use Sibelius
or Finale, both fairly full-featured but proprietary commercial
programs---an "open source Finale" hasn't yet appeared.
There is also an MPEG working group trying to develop an open standard
for music representation, but it works slowly. The main stumbling
block, besides being a working group in the first place, is that music
representation is a much harder problem than it seems at first---there
are a *ton* of variations in how people have written scores over the
years, many of them conveying substantive information that needs to be
captured somehow.
-Mark