Thanks for all the interest and comments about MusicXML. I wanted to reply to some of David and William's points in particular:
> Yes, [MusicXML is] vastly superior to what would be required with a > mere MIDI import, but it still requires a lot of work to get the > result into the exact layout as you had in Finale. The reason is > quite simple: an ETF includes information that MusicXML is just > not designed to capture and transmit. This is a valid criticism for MusicXML 1.0, but far less so for MusicXML 1.1. The formatting that will be available from Finale 2004 onwards will be much higher fidelity than what you have seen so far. We are approaching Robert's criteria for having arrived. And we have done this while maintaining compatibility, so that every valid MusicXML 1.0 file is a valid MusicXML 1.1 file. If people want to participate in the beta test of Dolet for Finale 3.0, please send me e-mail off-list or fill out the contact form at http://www.recordare.com/contact.html. You need a valid Dolet for Finale 1.0 or 2.0 license to use the 3.0 beta. > [MusicXML] cannot be so easily killed by politics, as NIFF was. I would suspect that NIFF's technical inadequacies were probably just as important as the politics. MusicXML matches the overall structure of Finale and Sibelius very well; NIFF does not. In NIFF's defense, we had the unfair advantage of coming along several years later. By that time the ETF format was published, and we were also able to leverage the software industry's huge investment in XML technology. > MusicXML ... is much more suitable than ETF. This is true for all the reasons discussed. But the big advantage of having the ETF format published, and available as a plain text format, is that this is what makes things like the MusicXML plug-in possible. The specification is available as part of the plug-in development kit, which is available from MakeMusic's download site. It's incomplete, but it was enough for software developers like us to get started with. > I don't know how you'd go about finding out the state of Sibelius's finances. You might be as surprised as I was to learn that being a private limited liability company in the UK is very different than being a private limited liability company in the USA. You can purchase Sibelius's financial information in PDF format for about $5 from the WebCHeck service at: http://www.companieshouse.co.uk Sibelius has been making a nice profit for several years now. Best regards, Michael Good Recordare LLC www.recordare.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
