Hi jef and Dennis, One of the motivations for creating MusicXML was to establish an archival-quality electronic format for common Western music notation (CWMN). It is a text-based and semantics-based format, which are essential starting points. But then the software has to evolve to fully capture what is in the originals, and to have a widespread ability to read the resulting files.
We have made a lot of progress in this area. The MusicXML 1.1 export built into Finale 2008 captures the great majority of both the content and the formatting of the Finale original file format. The MusicXML 2.0 export included with Dolet 4 for Finale captures even more of the original file content, including graphics. This is far better than the previous ETF solution for archiving because the data is far more universally usable than ETF files ever were. There are over 50 applications that can read MusicXML files now (and another 30 that can write MusicXML without reading it, such as music scanners and converters from old formats). One of Recordare's side projects is to set up facilities to be able to recover scores from older music programs and make them usable with today's programs. The PDFtoMusic Pro program is a big help here, and lets us convert from any program that can run on Windows, Mac OS X, or Mac OS 9. We're trying to get a Mac OS 7 machine up and running for some of the older Mac programs that can't run on OS 9. (If anybody local to the San Francisco Bay area can help with that, please contact me off-list.) DOS programs like Music Printer Plus are still a problem and will require writing special-purpose converters. We probably have the technical ability to do that now for MPP, if somebody can provide the funding. I will be speaking at a conference in Paderborn, Germany in December on "Digital Editing Between Experiment and Standardization." The main focus there is on preparing electronic critical editions, and one of the points I will try to make is the importance of the archival quality of the digital representation. There's more information on the conference at: http://www.edirom.de/index.php?id=28&L=1 That just covers CMWN scores. Electroacoustic music like you both are involved in is of course even more complex. But the progress in digital archiving of CWMN scores is at least a good starting point. MusicXML 2.0 has more multi-media support, but it involves using a binary file wrapper format (zip-based, so it's common, but still binary) for the mix of binary and text data. Best regards, Michael Good Recordare LLC www.recordare.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
