Hans de Rijck's MusicCVT

Background

There is a lot of free sheet music to be found on the internet. Unfortunately this music comes in all different formats and filetypes. Also the programs that produce sheet music have their pros and their cons.

Here we introduce a conversion program that can be used to read music from one source and translate it to another. At the moment, only conversion from NoteWorthy Composer to LilyPond format is supported but, if enough people are interested, it is possible to expand the possibilities to reading MusicXML.

What is MusicCVT?
MusicCVT is a program that converts music from one format to another.
What is NoteWorthy Composer?
NoteWorthy Composer (NWC) is a music composition and notation processor for Windows. It provides for the creation, play back, and printing of your own musical scores.
What is LilyPond?
LilyPond (LP) is a program that is dedicated to printing sheet music. It has no graphical front-end but operates in a batch window.
Why should I use two programs for one task?
Because both programs have their own strong points and weaknesses. NWC makes it very easy to write your scores using a graphical user interface but is not very good at producing quality print. LP on the other hand produces quality print but is hard to program. It has a very steep learning curve that not everyone is willing to take, and apart from that, it's syntax is not stable.
By using these two programs, you can combine the strong points of both. Apart from that, there are literally thousands of NWC scores readily available on the 'net.

Now, how does it work? Simple, save your NWC score and call MusicCvt with the name of the score (without .nwc). MusicCvt reads the score and creates an LP file. There are no commandline switches but MusicCvt can be configured through its .ini file.

The LilyPond file that is created is very easy to read and to maintain by hand.