Neil Jennings writes: | Problem is that the 'independent format' needs to accommodate all | functionality required from all formats. | I don't think MusicXML fits the bill yet. It doesn't seem to support some of | the constructs that I need (unless I have missed something). | | Agree that when we have a 'Universal Music format' then this would be the | preferred approach.
This is one of the standard problems with "universal" data formats. The people who design such formats usually seem to miss a lot of the information that is in other formats, or decide that such information isn't needed. The graphics world has some good examples. Thus, you can find programs that convert formats like PS, PDF, HTML, and other annotated formats into GIF or JPEG. The result may look the same on the screen. But when you try to do the reverse conversion, you discover that GIF and JPEG really just represent pixels, and lack aany of the structural information about the picture's components (letters, words, paragraphs, etc.). So JPEG -> PDF really can't be done at all correctly. We've seen the same sort of thing with music, when people attempt to use MIDI as a "universal" format. But MIDI doesn't need to represent things like bar lines or meter, because these aren't needed to play the music correctly. So a conversion of MIDI to other notations needs to guess at where the bar lines go. One of the problems that I think I've seen in my occasional looks at MusicXML is that it permits the representation of music as a pile of isolated notes, with no clues as to their structure. If you have this sort of MusicXML, there's no way you can extract things like voices from it. This is a traditional problems with a lot of piano "reductions" of music, of course, and it would prevent generating usable abc from the XML. You could only convert to abc when the XML contains the key, meter, and voice information that abc needs. And if the XML came from MIDI, you might have the voice lines, but you would probably not have the key, meter and bar-line info. It's possible that MusicXML could be used as an intermediary for other music notations. But the users of those other notations would have to work out a standard way of converting to MusicXML so that none of the original information (key/time signatures, voices, bar lines, etc.) would be lost. This is probably a non-trivial task, as it would take cooperation of the people developing all other music packages. In some cases, it couldn't ever work, because the input language simply lacks something that the output language requires. -- O <:#/> John Chambers + <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> / \ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
