MIDI to music sheet converter for Linux

Question

I am looking for a software that converts MIDI files into music notation.

I want the following features:

1. Should work on Linux
2. Should be able to run in terminal
3. Should be able to save the music sheet in a image format: JPEG or PNG

I have tried using musescore, which is an excellent software, but I can't find any command line (shell) interface.

Answer 1

There is a music notation program called Lilypond which includes a command line interface and a command line midi2ly converter that will read in a midi file and output a lilypond file.

• Should work on linux Yes and OS/X, Windows
• Should be able to run in terminal Yes or GUI for the main program
• Should be able to save the music sheet in a image format: jpeg or png Yes By default saves as both pdf and poscript format but you can specify -fpng for png format or -dbackend=svg for svg format
• Price: Free - Gratis & Open Source GNU GPL

The output of Lilipond is very high quality and the input files, (output from midi2ly), are text files that can easily be tweaked as needed.

While I haven't tested it you should be able to use:

midi2ly somefile.md | lilypond --pdf - -o somefile

There are a couple of known shortcomings of midi2ly especially when converting midi files that have been recorded by someone playing on a keyboard.