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Musicians Jam.

I haven’t seen anything with Github, but I’ve had some fun playing with the python client for EchoNest and uploaded some of my remixes on my blog – http://bit.ly/12dvM

Among other things, you can use Echo Nest to create midi files from musical notation, so this could be a way to quickly render a rough version of a composition you are collaborating on, or hear two diffs side by side.

SoundCloud is a popular musician collaboration site, but it’s more focused on electronic musicians then musicians writing scores.

SoundCloud seems great for music collaboration. Many artists use it to allow other people to do remixes of their songs. For example:

http://soundcloud.com/jazzanova-remix-contest

This looks also pretty cool:

http://www.ableton.com/share

I think you might appreciate Noteflight. It’s a free, web-based score editor that supports score collaboration, versioning, and embedding along with the standard music notation features. Of course it would be hard to beat git on the branching/merging side of things, but a nice GUI is well worth it for me.

To help with the gibberish, you might try Canorus. It’s a graphical music editor that can export to LilyPond. I’ve used it before and it works pretty nicely.

A little while back, Create Digital Music did a great piece on how musicians can use git to share Max patches, somewhat similar.

I certainly do! I keep all of my Pure Data patches in a git repository. It makes it really easy to keep my friends in sync when we play together and GitHub is great for publishing little bits that might be useful for other people.

On Preview: Tony beat me to it!

I keep my Lilypond files in git. It’s great for version control, but I can’t really imagine using it to collaborate. Like Zach said, musicians jam.

I have actually worked on a couple of tracks with a friend on the other side of the country via SVN . We just set up Logic to export all files/sameples when saving then set up an SVN repository and treatd it just like it was a site. It worked like a charm.

Yeah, I use source control at home for all my projects – even when not collaborating. I don’t always store the raw data in there, but absolutely for session files. That way you have backups when something melts down. It would be easy and makes sense to extend this for collaboration as well. Certainly a lot more efficient than sending giant ZIP files around.

I understand you’re looking for free, but Finale Notepad 2009 is almost free ($10) and offers a GUI . It offers a lot of features considering its price. I’m not affiliated with Finale in any way—I’ve just been happy with Notepad.

You could also consider looking into recording-based collaboration, rather than just sharing music sheets. I’ve had a lot of fun collaborating with others on Kompoz.com (you can take a look at crenz.kompoz.com for my page).

I recently found lilypond also, found a smattering of lilypond source on github, but no actual collaboration.

http://www.mutopiaproject.org/ is a collaboration to typeset out-of-copyright music, a git repo with all of these would be awesome.

Those suggesting GUIs, you’ve missed the point. I type quicker than I click. I can use my natural editor, refactor, keep things dry.

Lilypond has a built in scheme interpretor geek out

A friend and I were collaborating for a while in 2002 on almost exactly what you describe, transcribing choral settings into Lilypond. Fun to see someone else with the idea too.