How to write music theory symbols in evernote?

Question

I want type my music theory class notes in evernote but i can't seem to figure out how to do this correctly. I have managed to put following symbols in evernote just by copy and pasting but some as you can see are missing including clefs, ideally i would like to type these:

o whole note

? half note

♩ quarter note

♪ eighth note

♫ single bar note (2 eight note)

♬ double bar note

♭ flat note

♮ natural note

♯ sharp note

? clefs

Answer 1

This is primarily opinion based, but as someone who has taken a lot of calculus and engineering notes in LaTeX I feel like recommending Lilypond, which is basically the LaTeX of music:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LilyPond

http://www.lilypond.org/text-input.html

The primary advantage of such a tool is that it can produce very beautiful scores of all kinds, including neumatic notation and stuff: http://www.lilypond.org/examples.html

Most importantly, if you are a touch typist you don't need to take your eyes off the blackboard, you don't need to fiddle with the mouse and go through menus instead of paying attention in class.

You can actually not only paste it into Evernote (since it's text based), but you can embed it in a LaTeX source like an equation, so you can have beautifully typeset notation inside beautifully typeset lecture notes: http://www.lilypond.org/doc/v2.17/Documentation/usage/latex

The downside is that - for the basic things the learning curve is not really steep, but you need to have a look at the manual first, you can't get away with guessing your ways through menus.

Personally, I think the advantages are enormous, but there is an army of people out there who just won't touch anything that's not strictly WYSYWYG and menu-driven, so if you are one of them, it might not be your cup of tea.

EDIT: There is a web version, apparently: http://weblily.net

EDIT2: There is also a GUI which may be useful for beginners: http://denemo.org/

Answer 2

There are a few music fonts available which you could use instead of the normal font (Helvetica Neue is it?)

I haven't tested this as I already have a copy of Sibelius installed on my PC. However, an answer from the Sibelius Help Center suggests that if you install their web plugin, Scorch, then their Opus and Inkpen2 fonts will install with it.

You'll need to install the plugin, (and therefore the fonts), everywhere you use Evernote.

The music symbols can then be added by working out which character maps to each musical symbol.

Other available fonts:

http://key4song.lingolinda.com/intervals/musicfonts.html

(I don't have enough reputation to link to any more)

Answer 3

If you're needing to combine musical snippets with formatted text, there are a couple of things you can do.

First, if you're using evernote's web interface and not a standalone program, you can run it in Google Chrome, and get the "VexTab" add-on. This will let you type in music examples and have them imported right into the page you're working on. There's a learning curve, but it's not bad. The problem is, VexTab is a work in progress, and lately, not much progress has been made -- it seems to have stagnated.

The second possibility is to abandon evernote during music theory classes and instead use OpenOffice or (as I prefer) LibreOffice. Again, there's a learning curve to lilypond, but it really is powerful, and once you learn it you can do anything. And there's a lilypond extension for OpenOffice/LibreOffice, called ooolilypond. Install that through your extension manager, and then you just have to hit a button, type some quick lilypond quote, and you have your snippet, inserted into the file as a graphic.

Of course, if you want to use evernote to stay organized, you can always just use LibreOffice's word processor to create the notes, and then import them into evernote.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

The music fonts used in notation programs often don't work well in text-based documents, because the baselines of the characters are set up to position them on a music staff, not in a line of text.

A good music font that is designed to mix with text is http://www.mu.qub.ac.uk/tomita/bachfont/.

If you want a "complete" music font (more than 2400 glyphs!) which is professionally designed (by the same guy who designed the fonts for the Sibelius notation program) and free, try Bravura from http://www.smufl.org/fonts/. The November font referenced on the same page also looks good, but is not free.

My knowledge of Evernote is zero, so I don't know how well these fonts work with it.