basic-mode (the default) allows you to embed LilyPond snippets into an Org-mode file, and compile and export them using typical Org-mode commands (such as C-c C-e l p for pdf export). This is useful if you want to mix blocks of Lilypond-generated score with text, and perhaps other images to export to Latex, Docbook, pdf, or HTML. In other words, basic-mode could be used as a very flexible replacement to lilypond-book.

Warning! in basic-mode a lilypond source block requires a :file parameter as shown below, as failure to do so will result in an error message.

#+begin_src lilypond :file Mixolydian.png \relative c' { g a b c d e f g f e d c b a g a b c d e f g f e d c b a g1 } #+end_src

The previous block will produce an image file in .png format, which would be suitable for exporting to HTML for instance.

To generate a nice image for embedding into a pdf or Latex document, you might consider using the .eps (or .pdf) format as shown in the example below.

#+begin_src lilypond :file Mixolydian.eps \relative c' { g a b c d e f g f e d c b a g a b c d e f g f e d c b a g1 } #+end_src