Re: producing "archival" scores

[Graham Percival]

Jason Merrill wrote:
> You can turn anything else
> into lilypond via MusicXML, but once you've worked on it in lilypond,
> there's no obvious way to get it back into a different editable
> format.

See "to-xml.ly" and "song-*.ly" in the regression tests.

>  Luckily, this problem could be entirely addressed on
> Lilypond's end if it could be compiled to a suitable interchange
> format.  Figuring out if there was already a way to do this was the
> intent of my original question.

Short answer: yes.

Medium answer: no, AFAIK it's not really usable on its own.

Long answer: we would welcome any patches and developers interested in 
building *and maintaining* musicXML output (and input).  I considered 
submitting this as an idea for google summer of code, but my summer 
plans became busy enough that I decided not to apply.  I might do so 
next year, but a much better solution would be for an interested user to 
step forward and start coding.

musicXML -> lilypond   is currently done as a python script; python is a 
very nice language and is quite easy to learn.

lilypond -> musicXML   is currently done in scheme; scheme isn't as easy 
as python, but I don't think you need to learn a lot of it in order to 
do this.

Cheers,
- Graham Percival, LilyPond Documentation and Bugs