On Fri, 2003-02-28 at 15:36, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > > > Is there any chance Lilypond will ever be able to take MusicXML as > > > > input? How hard would it be, and how would it fit into lilypond's > > > > architecture? > > > > I've written a MusicXML to Lilypond converter, it is at > > > http://www.nongnu.org/xml2ly. > > > I'm sure you've put a lot of thought and effort into this converter, but > > my feeling is that as long as this kind of transcoding is external to > > lily, MusicXML users will be second-class citizens. Some things will > > work, some things won't. > > > Perhaps an unspoken part of my question was "do the lilypond developers > > care to support this format?" Really supporting the format would mean > > more than finding the closest mudela equivalent for every MusicXML > > directive. > > There is no good technical reason to read MusicXML directly into > lilypond, so I prefer to keep it outside.
An explanation for why you say this would be an answer to my original question. > As for the "lilypond > developers" opinion: I've personally spent a lot of time writing > convertors (etf2ly, pmx2ly, musedata2ly, etc.) only to find out that > noone uses them. Would you use a compiler that required you to first run your source file through an external program that translates your program into a different language with vastly different semantics? Would you feel that you can count on every construct in the target language being translated correctly? Even assuming this translation can happen in a robust way, in this case the target language (mudela) is changing all the time; what if the converter becomes unmaintained? It will no longer be usable. Surely you can appreciate the different between native support and support that requires an external converter. > > It seems that > > supporting this format would benefit everyone involved. > > MusicXML is neither a particularly advanced or complicated format. Why > don't you try implementing support yourself and "scratch your own > itch"? I was thinking about trying sometime, but I didn't know how it would fit architecturally into lily; I posted my question hoping to gain this information. I really have no idea how lilypond is put together (even though I have used it some, and contributed two scores to the mutopia project). I am especially unclear on the division between TeX, C++, and Guile. I was hoping to find out if lily's architecture would make it easy to write another language front-end or not. Josh _______________________________________________ Lilypond-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
