[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: format conversion questions
From: |
Darius Blasband |
Subject: |
Re: format conversion questions |
Date: |
Tue, 23 May 2006 10:49:47 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616 |
Hello,
We are currently looking at the possibility of using Lilypond as
typesetting back-end for Finale. In other words, the process we (I mean,
Han-Wen and I) are
looking at goes as follows:
- Music XML export
- Convert to lily
- Print on the fly.
I understand that the converter is meant as a migration tool where the
generated Lilypond could be maintained from there on,
but we what we are looking at is something where 100% automation is the
ultimate goal, so that
the original score can be maintained in Finale, and reproduced in
Lilypond form anytime, to compensate for Finale's weaknesses
when printing the final scores, specially when part extraction is involved.
The Finale export of MusicXML seems to be decent (There was a bad glitch
with old Finale 2005 versions though) and importing it
in Sibelius gives appropriate results, except for percussion stuff,
violin markups, rolled chords. There might be other defects in Sibelius's
Finale's importer, as we have not performed a complete sanity check on this.
(In all fairness, I must admit that "we" is at best a figure of speech:
Han-Wen does the coding, I just look at the results...)
The MusicXML to Lilypond converter is now robust enough to deal with
pretty large and complicated scores. We've applied it
to a significant piece with good - even if incomplete - results. The
overall structure is ok - and the complexity of just that should
no be underestimated ! -- there are just things missing.
Darius.
P.S.: Any help at financing the MusicXML stuff is welcome... I think
there is still somewhere around the 700 Euros to be spent
on this before a "common" score can be translated seamlessly,
with dynamics, annotations, grace notes, and tons of other depressing
details...
Atte André Jensen wrote:
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.