I would be grateful for any help typesetting music in LaTeX. I've tried to use MusiXTeX but have been very frustrated.
As I understand it, the MusiXTeX notation has a steep learning curve, but I'm OK with that; the notation seems to be well documented. The hardest part is installation and getting a simple "hello world" example to work.
I'm not committed to MusiXTeX; I'll try anything that works with LaTeX. But I've tried other alternatives and been equally frustrated with them.
How about LilyPond? It uses its own plaintext notation, but uses TeX for output. The engine itself uses a whole slew of measures to analyze the music and produce pretty sheet music, so it's automated to a much greater extent than MusixTex is.
Lilypond has a preprocessor called lilypond-book that lets you mix LaTeX code with Lilypond code in one source file.
Sample usage: tsst.lytex contains this:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\begin[quote,fragment,staffsize=26]{lilypond}
c' d' e'
\end{lilypond}
\end{document}
It also supports inline notation (instead of a display), and reading from external files.
Compile it with lilypond-book --pdf tsst.lytex, producing pdf images of each system along with a LaTeX file tsst.tex that includes the snippets, which compiles as usual with pdflatex.
If you have simple notations (folk tunes and the like), something like ABC might be a good fit. Simple markup-based notation, but prints to LaTeX. Wikipedia has a good example
X:1
T:The Legacy Jig
M:6/8
L:1/8
R:jig
K:G
GFG BAB | gfg gab | GFG BAB | d2A AFD |
GFG BAB | gfg gab | age edB |1 dBA AFD :|2 dBA ABd |:
efe edB | dBA ABd | efe edB | gdB ABd |
efe edB | d2d def | gfe edB |1 dBA ABd :|2 dBA AFD |]
Which produces
