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Process of drawing music notation at high quality for reproduction

Music engraving is the art of drawing music notation at high quality for the purpose of mechanical reproduction. The term music copying is almost equivalent—though music engraving implies a higher degree of skill and quality, usually for publication. The name of the process originates in plate engraving, a widely used technique dating from the late sixteenth century. The term engraving is now used to refer to any high quality method of drawing music notation, particularly on a computer ("computer engraving" or "computer setting") or by hand ("hand engraving").

Historically, a musician was required to draw his own staff lines (staves) onto blank paper. Eventually, staff paper was manufactured pre printed with staves as a labor saving technique. The musician could then write music directly onto the lines in pencil or ink. In the twentieth century, music staff paper was sometimes printed on vellum or onionskin—a durable, semi transparent material that made it easier for the musician to correct mistakes and revise the work, and also made it possible to reproduce the manuscript through the ozalid process. Also at this time, a music copyist was often employed to hand copy individual parts (for each performer) from a composer's full score. Neatness, speed, and accuracy were desirable traits of a skilled copyist.

Lithography: Similar to metal plate engraving, the music was etched onto limestone and then burned onto the surface with acid to preserve the stone plates for future use. Stencils, stamps, and dry transfers, including the Notaset, a system inspired by the Letraset used in the twentieth century. Brushing ink through stencils was a high quality technique used by Amersham based company Halstan & Co.
Music typewriters: Originally developed in the late nineteenth century, this technology did not become popular until the mid 1900s. The machines required the use of pre printed manuscript paper. This technique produced low quality results and was never widely used.

With the advent of the personal computer since the 1980s, traditional music engraving has been in decline, as it can now be accomplished by computer software designed for this purpose. There are various such programs, known as scorewriters, designed for writing, editing, printing and playing back music, though only a few produce results of a quality comparable to high quality traditional engraving. One such program was SCORE for MS DOS. Scorewriters have many advanced features, such as the ability to extract individual parts from an orchestral/band score, to transcribe music played on a MIDI keyboard, and conversely to play back notation via MIDI. Beginning in the 1980s, WYSIWYG software such as Sibelius, Mozart, MusicEase, MuseScore, Finale, and Dorico first let musicians enter complex music notation on a computer screen, displaying it just as it will look when eventually printed. Such software stores the music in files of proprietary or standardized formats, usually not directly readable by humans. Other software, such as GNU LilyPond and Philip's Music Writer, reads input from ordinary text files whose contents resemble a computer macro programming language that describes bare musical content with little or no layout specification. The software translates the usually handwritten description into fully engraved graphical pages to view or send for printing, taking care of appearance decisions from high level layout down to glyph drawing. The music entry process is iterative and is similar to the edit compile execute cycle used to debug computer programs. Beside ready made applications there are also some programming libraries for music engraving, such as Vexflow (Javascript library), Verovio (C++, Javascript and Python), Guido Engine (C++ library), and Manufaktura Controls (. NET libraries). The main purpose of these libraries is to reduce time required for development of software with score rendering capabilities.