I wanted to reply to a couple of the comments raised regarding file conversion back and forth between Finale and Sibelius:
> I won't switch until either MakeMusic goes under > or until Sibelius can open, natively, Finale files. The latter will not happen. Sibelius 6 has removed the importers for Finale, SCORE, Acorn Sibelius, and ASCII tab files. Daniel Spreadbury stated on the Yahoo list that "we elected to remove them, and there's no going back from that decision. We are committed to continuing to improve the MusicXML importer, which is now the notation interchange format of choice for most applications." One of our goals when starting the MusicXML project was to reduce the number of file converters that music software developers had to write. Sibelius 6's streamlining of its file importers is an example of what we had in mind. > The problem at the moment seems to be in the other > direction, importing Sibelius files into Finale, but > that problem goes back to Coda's refusal to support > a universal protocol some years ago... Well, the translation in both directions is pretty good these days, making it an enormous time saver. Of course there is room for improvement in both directions, and those gaps are more critical for some scenarios than for others. When going from Sibelius to Finale, the problems are largely due to gaps in Sibelius's plug-in development support. However, Sibelius's plug-in support has been getting better with each release. The new ManuScript features added in Sibelius 6 should allow for higher quality MusicXML export from Sibelius in the future. Coda indeed did not support the NIFF effort, but the NIFF format was very graphical, making it a poor match for the way that programs like Finale and Sibelius work. This is one reason why NIFF never came close to being a universal protocol. Coda was the first major notation company to support the MusicXML format starting with Finale 2003. MakeMusic still leads in notation interchange across applications, given the level of MusicXML support in everything from Finale 2009 to NotePad 2009. Best regards, Michael Good Recordare LLC www.recordare.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
