On Sun, 2015-11-08 at 21:48 -0700, Abraham Lee wrote: > It looks like they use MusicXML as their main data format then process > it into LilyPond syntax for engraving on their server.
> Maybe we could work with them to leverage their converter if it works > well. This is highly unlikely, I think you have been seduced by the MusicXML-universal-format myth: it is very easy to create a MusicXML file from some music. And knowing exactly how you have created it, it is easy to read it back (and easy to create LilyPond for it). So Scorio can easily take input from the user store it using their version of MusicXML and retrieve it again without having the remotest chance of reading MusicXML generated by some other proram. There are any number of ways you can create a "valid" MusicXML description of some music and it very unlikely that someone could create a MusicXML reader that will understand whatever choices you made and interpretation you gave without first seeing examples of what you generate. So Sibelius can read its own MusicXML (I presume) and so on for all the others. Only the people behind MusicXML (that's Finale I think) can expect their output to be read by others, because they are the de facto standard. They provide a set of examples which people use to test their reader - the pages of "documentation" look impressive but are (inevitably?) ambiguous. I notice that MEI talks happily about there being "many ways" you can describe the same music notation in its format. It seems to me that the ideal would be a way of describing a book containing music notation where there would be only one output file that correctly described it. I imagine it would need to be a highly constrained notion of what a book containing music notation is, to make that possible. And yet, at the other extreme, it seems clear that many people would wish to rescue all the notes that they had so painstakingly entered into some software for re-use in another program when the original gets dropped. Richard _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user