LilyPond

LilyPond can take plain text input and transform it into a musical score. You can just type in the notes you want, along with other annotations, in a simplified language and the application will take care of the spacing, line brakes and other aspects automatically. Its main purpose is to make musical score editing on a computer easy and to transform the ugly-looking computer-printed sheet music into elegant-looking traditional sheet music.

The application is free and open source and it is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD. It comes in a small package and it can be installed quickly and effortlessly. The hardware requirements are modest and there is no need to install any prerequisite tools.

LilyPond doesn't come with a user interface of its own. When launched, the application will bring up a TXT document, with instructions for performing a test run. The basic principle behind LilyPond is quite simple. You can type the notes you wish to use, in order, in a Notepad document, along with other annotations. Once you save your document, you can simply drag it and drop it over the application's executable or shortcut.

Once you drop the Notepad document over the LilyPond's icon, the application will automatically create a PDF with the corresponding scores. You may need a bit of time to learn the basic commands. However, once you master them, you will only need to think about your music, instead of how to make the sheet look better and how to export it.

With LilyPond's smart functionality, you will be able to create beautiful sheet music, without thinking about the actual process.