Michael Good wrote:
Hi Jim,
What became of NIFF, if anything?
NIFF was little-used outside the scanner community, and is now
generally considered obsolete:
http://www.musique.umontreal.ca/personnel/Belkin/NIFF.doc.html
That link brings up an essentially empty page for me -- it has the
heading and Belkin's name at the top, but simply states:
"Niff has now been superceded by Musik XML."
It was little-used because the biggest player in the field at the time
pulled out of the consortium. Coda didn't choose to continue with the
concept, for some reason. Perhaps it was too restricting, perhaps it
was too easy then for people to make Finale-knockoff applications, who
knows, but they pulled out, leaving scanners and Nightingale as the only
applications I've heard of which supported that standard, until Notion
came along within the past couple of years, but that is from the same
team which brought out Nightingale, if I'm not mistaken, so supporting
NIFF made an easy transition for former customers to migrate to Notion
MusicXML is a much better supported concept, and if I understood the
inner workings I might have a clearer idea, but my perception is that it
is a far better standard for notation data interchange.
But I do wonder where NIFF would be today, had Coda not pulled out of
the consortium which was supposedly dedicated to developing it all those
years ago.
Imagine what a rich notation-software world this would be if the
programs could automatically, perfectly and transparently work with
each-other's data files, so that we could use different applications for
different aspects of the music, should we so choose.
Although that is marginally possible now with MusicXML, that still
requires extra steps and not all the data and layout is transferred.
It has been a joy, though, watching MusicXML mature, and seeing what the
newest version can actually translate.
I think we truly have a notation lingua franca on our hands that just
needs a bit more development to finally mature to the point where
working with different applications to capitalize on strengths and avoid
weaknesses.
Hearty congratulations to Michael Good and his development team -- I'm
glad this has been able to develop as a 3rd party tool so that none of
the big-guns of notation software has been able to bend it to only serve
its purposes.
With MusicXML, MakeMusic is off the hook for inter-version compatibility
(at least going back as far as plug-ins allows), as long as Recordare
continues to make Dolet plugins for previous versions of Finale which
utilize the latest MusicXML developments.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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