Dear Rustom,

I have looked at the NtEd example and, obviously, this is also a very powerful piece of software. However, I see as a significant drawback that it only works on one platform and does not have the plain text TeX-ish appeal many on this list  appreciate. But using it as a front-end for lilypond might be   helpful for some users - similar to using equation editors with elaborate graphical user interfaces that can export TeX snippets.

As Nick has pointed out, lilypond can generate MIDI output along with high-quality PDF. At least in my examples, the MIDI output even reflected dynamics and voices correctly (a good way of checking a score). 

I have written a simple elisp function: on pressing F1, the current lilypond buffer is compiled (in the usual meaning) and, on success, the resulting PDF opened. Nice: clicking on a note in the PDF file will open the appropriate lilypond file in Emacs - at the appropriate position (of that note). Instead of opening the PDF, one could play the MIDI file with an external player. However, although this will work well in general, there will still be cases where this kind of approach is not "immediate" enough if your focus is on fast audio feedback (ideally, you would want to mark a lilypond snippet in Emacs and listen to it immediately; if you keep the lilypond input simple enough, this is not so difficult to implement, maybe I will look into it).

Warm regards,
 Stefan

On 03.10.2010, at 05:19, Rustom Mody wrote:

> Hi Stefan
> 
> Maybe a bit OT but I find nted useful for my musical needs:
> http://vsr.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/~jan/nted/nted.xhtml
> because it both plays and shows music quite well. [I use it to teach singing]
> Does lilypond play also?
> 
> One small gripe with nted is that it exports but does not import lilypond.
> 
> Rustom
> 
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