Ben Crowell wrote:
> I'm interested in starting a discussion of conversion, mirroring, and
> editing of PD and open-source music files.
Count me in: free music is only useful if it is useable in practise. A
bunch of incompatible, unconvertible formats is no good to most people.
> I use Finale; when I bought it, it was the best professional-quality
> music software that ran on MacOS.
Fine, you can't attack all the world's evils at once ;-)
> I dove in and started writing an open-source conversion program to
> convert from Finale format to the openly-defined NIFF format used by
> Neume.
How much of that would carry over into a Finale-to-Mudela converter? Or
would the conversion go via NIFF? (I know nothing about NIFF)
> you folks would presumably be more interested in [Finale-to-Mudela]
Though I am not interested in making my work available in proprietory
formats, I do think Finale<-->Mudela would help Mutopia. My reasoning:
Mutopia's aim is to provide free music in a [particular] open format. How
the music arrives in that format should be irrelevant. If submitters were
to use Finale to generate scores, then convert these to mudela for
submission, then (assuming the conversion is clean technically) these
scores would be in no way inferior.
There are many people out there who are familiar with Finale but not
Lilypond, some of whom might contribute to Free Music. If we can provide
a tool which lets them contribute, i.e. Finale-to-Mudela, then Mutopia
will benefit from it. If we want them to be able to maintain these
submissions, and accept patches, then Mudela-to-Finale would be necessary
too.
A two-way converter could also make people able to use Lilypond in
situations where they have to exchange data with Finale users. I don't
really see a downside. Finale is the established product. Is this any
different from Gnumeric reading Excel files?
Regards,
David
