A music notation engraving library

A music notation engraving library

Designed for the Music Encoding Initiative - Fast - Light - Flexible - No dependencies

Command-line version

The Verovio codebase is C++17 compliant and is cross-platform. It has been tested on several operating systems and architectures. This section describes how to build and install the command-line version of the toolkit from the command-line or using some of the most popular IDEs. There are currently no pre-built binaries of the command-line toolkit available except for Homebrew on macOS. However, building it is very straight-forward.

Homebrew on macOS

For macOS users using Homebrew, the command-line version can be installed with:

brew install verovio

This also installs the resources and you will be ready to go.

You can also install the latest development source with:

brew install verovio --HEAD

Building on macOS or Linux

To build the command-line tool, you need CMake to be installed on your machine as well as a compiler supporting C++17. The commands to build are the following:

cd tools
cmake ../cmake
make

You can increase the building speed by using the -j option when running make that specifies the number of jobs to be run in parallel:

make -j 8

The generates a verovio binary within ./tools. You can run Verovio from there or install it. Installing it means copying the executable and the resource files to directories which paths are globally accessible. You simply need to run:

sudo make install

If you do not install it and run it from ./tools or from another directory, you need to use the -r option to set the appropriate resource directory. The parameter of the -r option has to be a path to the ./data folder of the codebase.

To see the current default resource path, look for the “resource path” section in the full help output. You should see something like this:

verovio -h full
...
-r, --resource-path <s>        Path to the directory with Verovio resources (default: "/usr/local/share/verovio")

Keep in mind that if you have installed, you should not run another version without re-installing it or using the -r options to point to a non-default path, because otherwise the resources installed can be invalid. A typical problem is missing font glyphs that a newer version needs but that are not in the older version of the resources.

(Until version 2.6.0, the cmake command was cmake . and not cmake ../cmake.)

Basic usage

To seeing the basic command-line options, run:

verovio --help

To see all command-line options, run:

verovio -h full

For typesetting an MEI file with the default options, you need to do:

verovio -o output.svg Hummel_Concerto_for_trumpet.mei

If you use a version locally that is not installed, do not forget to add the -r parameter:

./verovio -r ../data -o output.svg Hummel_Concerto_for_trumpet.mei

Additional building options

By default, the executable is not stripped. To strip it during the installation do

sudo make install/strip

To build Verovio without Plaine and Easy support, run:

cmake ../cmake -DNO_PAE_SUPPORT=ON

To allow PAE support again, you must run the command

cmake ../cmake -DNO_PAE_SUPPORT=OFF

since running cmake ../cmake will not clear the state of the define variable.

The other building options are:

  • NO_ABC_SUPPORT for the ABC importer to be turned on/off
  • NO_MXL_SUPPORT for the compressed MusicXML importer to be turned on/off
  • NO_HUMDRUM_SUPPORT for the Humdrum importer to be turned on/off
  • MUSICXML_DEFAULT_HUMDRUM to use the MusicXML Humdrum importer by default instead of the direct MusicXML importer
  • BUILD_AS_LIBRARY for Verovio to be built as dynamic shared library instead of a command-line executable

Uninstall a previous version

If you have installed Verovio with Homebrew, run:

brew uninstall verovio

To uninstall a previously installed version of Verovio from the system, run:

rm -f /usr/local/bin/verovio
rm -rf /usr/local/share/verovio

Troubleshooting

Occasionally there are problems with updates necessary to the Makefile when compiling a new version of Verovio with make. It may be necessary to clear out the automatically generated cmake files and regenerate them. To do that, run:

rm -rf CMakeFiles CMakeCache.txt Makefile cmake_install.cmake

Or, when using CMake 3.24 or later, you can simply run:

cd tools
cmake ../cmake --fresh

Windows 10

To build Verovio on Windows 10 from the command-line, you will need to have Microsoft C++ Build Tools and make installed on your computer.

Run the following commands from the x86 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS (with administrator privileges):

cd <sourceCode>/tools 
cmake ../cmake -G "NMake Makefiles"
nmake
nmake install

After the installation, add <sourceCode>/tools to the PATH of your system.

When running the commands, the resource path should be provided explicitly with the following option:

-r "C:/Program Files (x86)/Verovio/share/verovio"

Xcode

For macOS users, there is also an Xcode project in the Verovio root directory.

By default, humdrum support is turned off in Xcode. To turn in on, you need to use the Verovio-Humdrum building scheme.

Visual Studio

  • Install CMake
  • Go into the tools folder of Verovio
  • Execute cmake ../cmake -DNO_PAE_SUPPORT=ON (add -DCMAKE_GENERATOR_PLATFORM=x64 for a x64 solution)
  • Open the resulting Verovio.sln with Visual Studio and build it from there

Visual Studio Code

Verovio contains simple predefined build tasks in the tasks.json file.

You can build Verovio by pressing Ctrl+Shift+B / ⇧⌘B or running Run Build Task from the global Terminal menu.