> Has anyone ever heard of a utility for converting between NoteWorthy > Composer (a PC-only program) and Finale (any version)?
I've seen the occasional postings on the Noteworthy Composer boards about people trying to write a Noteworthy to MusicXML translator. But such things are difficult to do when the Noteworthy format isn't published. Somebody wrote one that is supposed to work with uncompressed NWC files. If you have such a file, e-mail it to me off-list and I'll be happy to try it out and see how it works. (I'm leaving on vacation soon, though, so it's best if I could test this in the next day or two.) If that doesn't work, your best bet is either to use MIDI, or print-and-scan using SharpEye Music Reader. > However, I'm pretty sure NWC can save as NIFF (Notation Interchange > File Format), which Finale is supposed to be able to read. I don't know any music notation editing program besides Lime that saves NIFF files, though music scanning programs do. Finale has never been able to read NIFF files. Sibelius used to read NIFF files on Windows, but this feature never worked very reliably and was dropped from Sibelius 4. > Apparently NIFF and MusicXML are fairly similar. Aside from being notation interchange formats, NIFF and MusicXML have little in common. MusicXML did borrow some small ideas from NIFF. NIFF had a lot of really smart people working on it, but for MusicXML's purposes it mostly served as an example of how not to do a music notation interchange format: - Don't use a graphical model. For example, there's no concept of pitch in NIFF, just staff line position. A notation interchange format should have musical concepts at its core, not graphical concepts. - Don't use a binary format; use a text format. Here we had an unfair advantage since XML hadn't been invented when NIFF was developed. - Don't develop an interchange format independent of working software. We would never have kept going with the MusicXML format if we hadn't been able to build a working translator for either Finale or Sibelius. If your interchange format can't work with at least one of the market leaders, who is going to want to use it? Those who are interested can find more details at: http://www.idealliance.org/papers/xml2001/papers/html/03-04-05.html Best regards, Michael Good Recordare LLC www.recordare.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
