format conversion questions

[Atte André Jensen]

Hi

I teach piano in a couple of music schools. Teachers there use 
everything from finale, sibelius, musicator and cubase to abc to typeset 
the stuff we give to students.

It would be nice to be able to share sheets between teachers, so I'm 
thinking about making a web based system that would allow people to 
access each others music. It should be possible to modify the files, so 
a common central format is needed. And pdf's wouldn't be flexible enough.

I though about having the stuff laying in a mysql database in musicxml 
format, and using lilypond for making sheets in pdf format from there.

So here goes:

1) Which are my options for converting musicxml to lilypond? How good is 
the conversion and how exotic can the typesetting get for this to work?

2) How good are the tools for exporting musicxml from the major 
commercial programs (finale, sibelius, musicator)? How about importing?

3) Is there a better way to go about this, for instance by making 
lilypond the central format? In that case how good (if existing) is the 
conversion between the major commercial notation software and lilypond 
and back?

4) Is there any obvious things I've overlooked?

5) Would this at all be possible at the moment?

Note that all conversions should be done automatically with no human 
correction to the output. In this case noone (except me:-)) is really 
interrested in either lilypond or musicxml, they just want to share 
music and such a site should "just work"...

Thanks in advance for any feedback, ideas and help.

--
peace, love & harmony
Atte

http://www.atte.dk      | quartet:      http://www.anagrammer.dk
http://www.atte.dk/gps  | compositions: http://www.atte.dk/compositions