Sing Alongs

Motivation

I love to play the tin whistle and around 2012 I was looking for some sheet music. There are a lot of good resources out there but the one thing I have never found was a collection which was free (as in freedom) and usable for printing. And if something does not exist why not try and create it yourself?

At this point I discovered Lilypond a wonderful project for music engraving. The best part is that it has support for embedding its scores in LaTeX files so it is possible to get complex layouts without a big hassle. As a programmer I instantly liked the approach because I did not need a big editor but could just write text files which I then could manage with something like git.

Development

Main development happens at https://code.vanwa.ch/sing-alongs but there is a mirror of the git repository on Github.

Take a look at the command list in the makefile to see what you need for building.

The makefile defines multiple targets:

• pdfs: builds all songs as single pdfs (without lyrics for now)
• midis: builds the midi file for each song
• music: converts the midi files into opus files
• book: concatenates the songs (with lyrics) to a songbook
• booklet: converts the songbook to a booklet fit for double sided flip printing

To build all just run make and it takes care of everything.

License Stuff

I am still not quite clear on how this works. My understanding is that all these songs already are in the public domain and there is no need to explicitly set a license.

All copyrights that could arise from other sides (makefile or whatever) are waived under CC0.

Contact

You can reach me at shugentobler@vanwa.ch