I have an extended comparison of GUIDO and Mudela as part of my Master's thesis-in-progress. It exists in an earlier form at:
http://mambo.peabody.jhu.edu/~mdboom/format.pdf I must warn all readers, however, that this document is over a year old and is no longer very current and may contain factual errors. Let's not start a flame war, because I believe both languages have their place, but I thought this might provide more food for thought and discussion. For my own work, GUIDO was the clear choice, but your needs/mileage my vary. Excerpt from the conclusions of the revised version: For an end user typing in music directly, Mudela's concise syntax can be learned easily. GUIDO's more verbose syntax can be cumbersome at times. The human issues of entering the representation manually, however, was not a strong consideration for the present system. The availability of software tools is also an important factor. Presently, the freely available GUIDO tools are not fully functioning, while LilyPond is stable and quickly approaching the level of professional-quality output. I have not evaluated the commercial GUIDO tools, but regardless of their design or usefulness, it may be problematic to embark on an open-source project whose only possible interchange is with a commercial product. >From the point-of-view of an implementor, GUIDO is a much more elegant and practical language than Mudela. It is clearly defined and its design ensures language stability even as new extensions are added. The available GUIDO parser kit is well designed and easy to use by developers. Clearly, choosing a musical representation language for any project is a difficult task. In the end, for the OMI project, we decided not to decide: to ensure that the OMI system was extensible enough that to new output formats could be added as easily as possible. However, GUIDO is gradually winning over as our language-of-choice for the long-term archiving of scores. GUIDO's superior design should ensure that it receives wide-acceptance, but until then leaving OMI as open as possible seems to be the best solution. Regards, Mike -- Michael Droettboom [EMAIL PROTECTED] 410.625.7596 Computer Music Research Peabody Conservatory of Music Johns Hopkins University ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 23:15:13 -0200 From: Nelson Posse Lago <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [linux-audio-dev] lilypond and GUIDO (WAS: Project XEMO, MusicXML) On Wed, Nov 14 2001 at 08:28:54am -0500, Karl MacMillan wrote: > [...] Supporting basic music notation is fairly straightforward, but > providing all of the functionality to support complex, modern notation is > difficult. See Guido for a format that does a good job at the harder parts > of notation - http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/AFS/CM/GUIDO/ Well, the advanced examples are all Bach, so I'm not sure if by "modern" notation you mean 20th-century notation. If not, how do you feel this format compares to the format used by lilypond? After all, lilypond at least has a free parser/processor that generates good quality output on linux... See ya, Nelson
