Re: Help with Mac

[Maurits Lamers]

Hi Alejandro,

The DMG was a way to quickly install Lilypond, but it came with a few downsides.

The biggest one was that Lilypond was bundled as part of the LilyPad editor app. This was what was started when you would doubleclick Lilypond.app. The LilyPad editor was a very barebones editor, and as with every piece of software it needed maintenance. That maintenance became problematic and increasingly pointless when comparing the feature set of that editor with something like Frescobaldi.
Additionally, in later versions of macOS, Apple started requiring signed applications, for which you need a (paid) Apple Dev account.

Therefore, the decision was made to offer lilypond as a download in .zip format (generic package), instead of a .dmg with a .app in it. Sadly it is not as simple as copying over the contents of a .dmg, but the increased strictness by Apple around signed applications is a major cause.

To install lilypond on a modern mac, you can follow these steps:

1. Download the generic package for macOS (lilypond-2.24.3 at the moment of writing) from https://lilypond.org/download.html
   
2. doubleclick on the downloaded zip file, to have the Archive Utility.app unzip it.
   
3. you will find a folder called "lilypond-2.24.3"
   
4. move this folder to the Applications / Apps folder
5. Check in System Preferences under Privacy and Security that your App security setting is set to "App store and identified developers"
   
6. open the lilypond-2.24.3 folder in the Applications folder, and open the bin folder inside of that
7. right click on the file called lilypond, and choose open
8. macOS will prompt you with a warning that it cannot verify the identify of the developer of 'lilypond' and whether you would like to open it or not.
9. Choose open.
10. Open the libexec folder and repeat step 7 to 9 with the files python3.10, gs and convert-ly.
11. Depending on which executables you need to use for your use case in addition to the ones above, you might have to repeat step 7-9 for more executables in the bin and/or libexec folder.
12. Assuming you use Frescobaldi as editor, go to the settings in Frescobaldi and add this lilypond version to the list of lilypond versions.

Following these steps should make things work as expected (without requiring any Terminal knowledge).

cheers

Maurits

Op 15-04-2024 om 22:22 schreef Alejandro Castera:

> Good afternoon, community.
>
> I've been using Lilypond on Mac for a long time, but for a few years now they haven't released a new version to install in DMG format. There are some packages to install via "ports" (which I haven't understood what they are) and using MacPorts or Homebrew (which I haven't understood how to use either). All this through the Terminal command line, which I don't understand how to use. For this reason, I am still using LilyPond version 2.20 because it was the last one installable as DMG. Please, if someone can guide me to install the latest version of LilyPond 2.24.3 because I have tried several times in different ways and have not succeeded. 
>
> Please, LilyPond developers, we need a DMG installer because not all of us Mac musicians know the Terminal command line.
>
> Thanks in advance for your attention. 
> Regards
>
>
>