Re: MusicXML

[Joshua Haberman]

Hello, thanks for the reply.

On Thu, 2003-02-27 at 09:18, Guido Amoruso wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-02-26 at 18:10, address@hidden wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > Is there any chance Lilypond will ever be able to take MusicXML as
> > input?  How hard would it be, and how would it fit into lilypond's
> > architecture?
> I've written a MusicXML to Lilypond converter, it is at 
> http://www.nongnu.org/xml2ly.

I'm sure you've put a lot of thought and effort into this converter, but
my feeling is that as long as this kind of transcoding is external to
lily, MusicXML users will be second-class citizens.  Some things will
work, some things won't.

Perhaps an unspoken part of my question was "do the lilypond developers
care to support this format?"  Really supporting the format would mean
more than finding the closest mudela equivalent for every MusicXML
directive.

> On the other hand, if you mean MusicXML as a direct input to Lilypond,
> I can't tell you much, but read http://www.lilypond.org/wiki/?XmlInput

I wonder if HanWen still holds this opinion now that MusicXML is out
there and maturing.  It may be that lilypond had no use for XML when
there was no published schema for interchange of music.  But now there
is and it seems to be a well-designed one at that.  It seems that
supporting this format would benefit everyone involved.  Lilypond would
become more useful since it would be capable of reading a widespread
interchange format.  Score authors would not have to lock themselves
into a format that is only readable by one program.

Maybe it's not the right direction for lily, but I'm surprised there
hasn't at least been more discussion about it.  I'm also surprised that
my message was bounced to -user when it asked the question "how would
this fit into lily's architecture?"  I guess I am to take this to mean
"it fits into lily's architecture by not being a part of lily."

Josh