Re: New Sibelius to LilyPond conversion suite

[Kirill]

Carl Sorensen <c_sorensen <at> byu.edu> writes:

> This brings up an issue that has been concerning me in this whole thread.
> 
> I believe that a good xml dump from Sibelius is a wonderful tool, and I'm
> delighted that Kirill has been working on it.  Thanks, Kirill!
> 
> However, it seems to me to be less than ideal to have both Kirill's xml->ly
> converter and the lilypond xml2ly that Reinhold has worked on.

As far as I know, xml2ly serves a somewhat different purpose. It is a MusicXML
to LilyPond converter, which is a very useful tool to have on its own, of 
course.
However, in order to convert Sibelius scores to LilyPond using xml2ly, one would
first need to translate from Sibelius to MusicXML before finally running xml2ly.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the
representation of scores in Sibelius and the representation of scores in the
language of MusicXML; therefore the first step, Sibelius->MusicXML, would
already incur losses (I call it translation, rather than conversion). Moreover,
there is no one-to-one correspondence between MusicXML and the LilyPond syntax,
therefore the second phase of translation, MusicXML->LilyPond would introduce
further inaccuracies.

The best tool I have seen so far to generate MusicXML from Sibelius scores is
Dolet 1. It is frankly awful and costs $99.95 (
http://store.recordare.com/doletsib1.html ) The quality of the generated
MusicXML is such that it burns my eyes. (The Finale version is, perhaps, better
-- so, xml2ly might be more useful to Finale users)

To make things work via xml2ly, one would need to write:
1) A simple plugin for Sibelius to dump the score in some format preserving 100%
of what can be programmatically accessed using Sibelius ManuScript language.
Say, dump all the score elements into an .XML
2) Write an interpreter to translate this into MusicXML (losses begin here).
3) Then run, with further losses, xml2ly.

Seeing how things are, I decided to avoid the intermediate step 2, hence SIB2LY.