dhbailey wrote:
And the new data format for Finale2K5 has been released publicly?
Finale2K4?
I won't speak to "publicly", as I'm uncertain of this; I would submit,
though, that it is instructive to compare the apparently outside the
Coda / Net4Music / MakeMusic organization who have written plugins that
appear to be impossible without upon knowing details of the Finale data
file structure, (including [based upon inclusion on Jari's Finale tips
site] Robert Patterson, Robert Piechaud, Tobias Giessen, Jari
Williamson, Philip Aker, Dimitri Tymoczko, Zbigniew Zuchowicz, Michael
Good, Enrico and Michele Bortolazzi, and Peter Castine) with the
comparable list of outsiders who have written plug-ins which might
depend upon knowledge of the Sibelisu file structure – Michael Good.
I would also note, that based upon this bit from the Sibelius Web site,
<http://www.sibelius.com/helpcenter/resources/plugins.shtml>:
Developing your own plug-ins?
If you are interested in developing your own plug-ins and want to
discuss ManuScript with other plug-in developers, you can join our
plug-in developer mailing list
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
that comparing Sibelius third party "plug-ins" with Finale third party
"plug-ins" is not a direct comparsion; unless Sibelius has written their
website with a peculiar inaccuracy, it appears to me that what Sibelius
calls a "plug in", MakeMusic calls a "Finale script", and that, with the
sole exception of Michael Good's Dolet for Sibelius, Sibelius has
nothing from a third party directly equivalent to, say TG tools.
How will our Finale data be any better accessible than Sibelius data,
should MakeMusic go out of business and nobody buy the Finale assets
at auction?
If you peruse the Lilypond website, you will note that there is a filter
to convert ~.etf files to lilypond format. I've not tried it, and have
no first-hand knowledge about how well it works. You will also note that
no filter to convert files from any Sibelius format to Lilypond.
Finally, back in March, when I was considering switching to Sibelius, I
posted questions in a couple of places, one of which was the newsgroup,
"rec.music.makers.choral". One of the questions I posted asked if
1) Sibelius provides registered users with detailed
information on the format of data files, and makes it
possible to save files in a form (similar to the ~.ETF files
of Finale).
which was forwarded to Sibelius technical support, and which was
answered in an email directly to me from Tom Betts, with Sibelius who
wrote, in part:
We do not supply anyone with details of our file format. We do not have a format similar to ETF at this time.
I am quite satisfied that in consideration of future accessibility of
data contained in a data file, that Finale is far and away a better
choice than Sibelius.
ns
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