As I've discussed conversions of files with Jan, an issue that's come up is whether Finale's ETF format is really an openly defined format. Since ETF is the most commonly encountered format on CPDL and FreeNote, I thought I'd try to clear this up to the extent I'm able. ETF stands for Enigma File Transport. There's an ascii version, and also a binary version. The binary version is of interest to us mainly because naive users need to be cautioned not to use it on the internet -- it won't work because it's in native word order. "ETF" normally refers to the ascii version. Although ETF is ascii, it's not intended to be edited or read directly by humans the way ly and abc are. As far as I can tell, ETF predates Coda Inc., but Coda is now the only software house that supports it. There is documentation for ETF format available from Coda's website, but only from a protected directory which you can't access without being the registered owner of a Coda product. The documentation is ok as far as it goes, and is in my opinion sufficient to write a conversion program to convert to or from ETF, but there are quite a few tags that are undocumented. If you make a simple Finale file with nothing in it but a single whole note, the ETF output is hundreds of lines long, and contains a lot of undocumented tags. There is a freely available ETF parser by Margaret Cahill: http://linux.csn.ul.ie/~cahillm/thesis.html It's in C++. I think her thesis said it was not really a finished project, and had some bugs. For my unfinished ETF->NIFF converter (http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=8169) I nearly completed the ETF parsing code. It's in C, since the project shares code with Neume. To try to clear up the legal status of the ETF documentation, I sent the following e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]: ---------------------------------------------------------- Hello, I was wondering if you could tell me about the legal status of your documentation for the ETF format. I am a registered owner of some Coda products, so I was able to download it as part of the Finale plug-in development kit. Am I allowed to share the documentation with people who are not registered users of Coda products? Was the intention to keep ETF proprietary by putting the doc in a protected directory, or did it just end up there because it was packaged with the PDK? Are there copyright, patent, trade secret, or licensing issues that would prevent the ETF documentation from being made more generally available? Is it OK for people who are not registered Coda users to include the relevant .h files in open-source software? Thanks in advance for your help in clarifying this! Ben Crowell
