I am sorry to hear you are still having struggles with this. It is contrary to my installation experience on my Mac running Sequoia 15.6 and previous recent MacOS versions. There are, I note, no installation instructions on the Lilypond download page nor do I find a README in the distribution with that information. That would be helpful. Here is how I successfully installed LilyPond on my Mac under Sequoia 15.6.
First, I downloaded and installed Frescobaldi since I find that the easiest front end for LilyPond. I used the .dmg version, the second option down under Assets: https://github.com/frescobaldi/frescobaldi/releases/tag/v4.0.3 I think there was some argument with Apple’s defenses over using an app downloaded from outside the App Store. Once that was installed and launchable, I turned to LilyPond itself: https://lilypond.org/download.html Clicking on the Mac version (specifically https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/releases/v2.24.4/downloads/lilypond-2.24.4-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz) downloaded the file lilypond-2.24.4-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz and put it (by default) in my Downloads folder. As long as “darwin” is in the file name you have the Mac version. Double clicking on the .tar.gz file unpacked it into a folder named "lilypond-2.24.4” (which actually is the app, just not with an icon that will go in the Dock since we don’t run LilyPond directly unless from the command line in Terminal). I moved the “lilypond-2.24.4” folder into my user folder on my Mac (but you could put it in the Applications folder if you prefer), launched and pointed Frescobaldi at it under Preferences > LilyPond Preferences (specifically ~/lilypond-2.24.4/bin/lilypond where the ~ is Unix shorthand for my home folder. If it’s in your Applications folder, the path will be accordingly different and might look something like /Applications/lilypond-2.24.4). And it works smoothly. This is easier than the old way of doing things when LilyPond came as a .dmg, although that was confusing the first time I did it as I was used to the old way of .dmg installs for years. I hope this helps! Tim > On Aug 14, 2025, at 11:15 AM, Flora Henderson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi All > > Many thanks to the respondents of my original message, emailed 25 July 2025, > where I outlined problems installing Lilypond on Mac Sequoia 15.5. > Unfortunately, the current version given for Mac is not compatible with Mac. > The Mac link given on the site instead takes you to a version of Lilypond > where the executable files are configured for Windows. There is no app for > Mac to install. Furthermore, the MacPorts package manager also does not seem > to be functional for Sequoia. > > I had a chat with an engineer from Apple Support (who is also familiar with > Windows and Linux) for another reason; I asked them to look at this as well. > Their subsequent recommendation was to contact the developers with > screenshots of the error messages in terminal. I had Lilypond installed on an > older Mac, but that is no longer functional either. Back to the drawing board. > > Regards > > Flora Henderson PhD (London) >
