David W. Fenton wrote: [snip]>
My bet is that you don't remember the failed NIFF project. MusicXML potentially will realize the promise that NIFF had in it, and since it's being developed independently of an particular music notation vendor, it cannot be so easily killed by politics, as NIFF was.
I remember that initiative, and I often wonder what would have happened to the notation software industry if Coda (as it was still known back then) hadn't backed out of that project.
The concept was wonderful, a unified data file format so that the end-user could pick and choose which application they wanted to work on the file at any particular time, and a person with Nightingale installed on their Mac could send a file to a person with Finale installed on their PC and they could actually get some work done, mutually editing the same file. As far as I recall, Nightingale was the only commercial product I ever heard about which actually support the NIFF format.
Coda was the big player in the field at the time and decided to throw its weight around and pulled out because it didn't foresee a future with any great competition. Too bad they were so shortsighted -- if they had stayed with the project, I am fairly certain the Finn brothers (Sibelius) would have felt obligated to incorporate it into Sibelius.
However, since NIFF failed, another option would be if the notation market were anywhere near as great as the word-processing market these nose-in-the-air types who make the programming decisions (not how to code things, but WHAT to code) might feel compelled to actually figure out how to save a file in the format of at least one other major competitor. So that Finale users could save their files in Sibelius format and vice-versa.
Oh well, we're stuck without a true lingua franca of the notation software world and MusicXML seems the only viable alternative at the moment.
The ETF format was released to the public, but has that information been updated with each subsequent annual upgrade? Or are we all assuming that the data format of an ETF has remained unchanged since the data was first released 7 or 8 years ago?
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
