Y’know what I absolutely love?

I love it when I find myself thinking, gee, wouldn’t it be great if such and such a piece of software existed…

Like, say, a sheet music typesetter that works from a markup language, sorta like LaTeX, but for music…

And then I think… naw, that’s too weird; I’m the only guy who’s gonna want something like that… I’m the only guy who gets why that would be so damned much better than screwing around with the mouse the way all the commercial packages require… No way someone’s already done it…

But then I think, damn, but that would be awesome software, all the same, maybe I should just do it myself…

And then I think, naw, no way. It would be so nice to have such a thing, but I ain’t got time…

And then I discover there already is such a thing?

And it’s open source, free, and freakin’ wonderfully done…

So wonderfully done the markup language is at once as obvious and as powerful as you could possibly ask. What? An A major scale, you say? How ‘bout just typing a b cis d e fis gis a?

So wonderfully done it already quite painlessly supports such useful stuff for my purposes as up and down bow marks and fingering notes…

So wonderfully done it actually makes considerably prettier sheet music than the annoyingly mouse-heavy commercial packages I already use…

So powerful, people are using it happily for full orchestral scores…

And there’s already a whole community of people publishing public-domain music in said markup language, free for download…

Like, say, Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites…

And because they publish the source, you can stick in your own bowings, fingerings, whatever the hell you feel like…

And contemplating this, I find myself thinking, damn, sometimes the open source community positively scares me with the odd little ways they change the world… In a mostly good way…

Yeah. I absolutely love that.

Lilypond. It’s just awesome.