Hello! I'm interested in starting a discussion of conversion,
mirroring, and editing of PD and open-source music files.
Let me tell you a bit about myself so you'll know where I'm
coming from. My name is Ben Crowell. I teach physics at
a community college in Southern California, and I have
a little experience with writing open-source software
(http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=8170), and
I run an open-source sheet music site called FreeNote
(http://freenote.org). I'm also an editor (currently
the only active editor) of the main sheet music category
on Netscape Open Directory
(http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Resources/Downloadable_Music_Sheets/),
which I've recently reorganized to help people find
open-source music and avoid the many sleazy commercial
sites that promise free sheet music but really just
link to various commercial sites.
OK, sorry for long digression, but I felt like I should
try to establish my open-source bona fides before getting
into the main topic, which could be about as popular in this
forum as a new tropical disease ;-)
If you look on my site right now, you'll find a small
catalog of music (the Bach two-part inventions, plus
some of my own jazz tunes), which is available in
PDF, MIDI, and Finale/ETF. Yes, maybe I should enroll
in a twelve-step program, but I use Finale; when I bought
it, it was the best professional-quality music software
that ran on MacOS. (I'm looking forward to MacOS X, which
will have BSD built in and allow me to run LilyPond.)
Once I started to get seriously interested in open-source
music, I realized that Finale/ETF was problematic because
it's only implemented in commercial closed-source software,
and although the format isn't a trade secret, the documentation
is incomplete and only available for download by registered
users of a Coda product. At this time I knew about Brian
Victor's Neume project (neume.org), but not about LilyPond,
so I dove in and started writing an open-source conversion
program (http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=8169)
to convert from Finale format to the openly-defined
NIFF format used by Neume. I stopped working on the
converter because Brian's NIFF-writing routines weren't
ready yet, and also because I got busy setting up FreeNote.
So we now have:
1. Mutopia, a general-purpose site that only accepts LilyPond format
2. FreeNote, a general-purpose site that accepts any format but
has mostly Finale format
3. CPDL, a choral-music site (with, by the way, the largest catalog
by far of any open-source site), with music mostly in Finale
format
4. scads of ragtime sites with all their music in MIDI and bitmaps
(and again, a huuuuuge base of users and a gigantic amount of
music compared to Mutopia or FreeNote)
5. scads of folk music sites with all their music in the open-
source, morally-pure-as-the-driven-snow abc format (and
again, much much more music than on our open-source sites)
This proliferation of formats is a bad thing if it impedes the
free exchange of information and makes life difficult for everyone.
While there is not currently _any_ functioning conversion software
of which I'm aware, it can actually be quite quick to convert
from one format to another via MIDI. After the translation, you
have to go back through and fix all the stuff that got lost
(ornaments, lyrics...) It is currently technically possible
for me to process music from Mutopia quite efficiently into
Finale format, for example, but you folks would presumably
be more interested in the reverse: e.g. I think I'm currently
the only site on the web that is making the Bach two-part
inventions freely available in source format, and if LilyPond
has MIDI input as well as output, I'd think it could be quite
quick and easy to convert them to LilyPond.
I approached Jan Nieuwenhuizen about converting his urtext of
the second Bach cello quite via MIDI into Finale format, and
more generally about starting up a dialog about what social
standards there should be for this kind of activity and
what the practical issues might be. Re the specific piece
of music in question, I would paraphrase his response as
Well, you don't have to ask my permission, because it's
public domain, but Finale is a bad proprietary format and
converting to it is a step backward, not forward. (Not an
actual quote.) Even if many of you agree with him that
LilyPond->Finale is pointless, you might presumably be more
interested in Finale->LilyPond. Even when the legal issues
are trivial (as with PD editions of PD music), there are
significant moral and practical issues, which I've discussed
at the following url: http://freenote.org/mirroring.shtml.
I'd like to invite the members of this community to read
my suggestions and comment on them.
Thanks for providing this forum, and my apologies for the
length of this post.
Ben Crowell
freenote.org
