Re: Photoscore

[Chris Yate]

On 27 Nov 2016 23:49, "Urs Liska" <address@hidden> wrote:
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> Am 28.11.2016 um 00:41 schrieb Chris Yate:
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>> Hi Jacques,
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>> I don't know... It seems ridiculous that they have no common format - but it's a relatively tiny industry...  But I doubt the big houses like Peters and Barenreiter use either Sibelius or Finale...
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> The big houses more or less *exclusively* use Sibelius and Finale in parallel, with a very low share still using SCORE and an actually tiny share using Amadeus.

Interesting. I've been told they use something else - a bespoke system, but maybe that's old information. Why use the two in parallel though?

.. And do you know, for actual production of books, do they use Adobe publishing tools, or something along those lines?

> Breitkopf just last year decided to quit any diversity and to move everything to Sibelius.
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>> In the larger world of office IT, Microsoft have dealt with the issue of everyone expecting to be able to share and consume MS Word documents by supporting ODF, though it's still a problem that some people expect to receive only .doc files.
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>> Anyway, I'm sure there would be Sibelius and Finale output converters for Lilypond, but that these file formats are proprietary.
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> This is only true in a hypothetical sense. Due to lack of resources we only have an extremely rudimentary MusicXML export so far (the fact that this is due to the single (!) developer working on it having taken a full-time job speaks volumes, I think). There has been a few attempts in recent years to improve the situation, but in the end it boils down to the fact that this will only happen with some substantial external funding.

So, is musicXML really a reliable interop format between the other systems?

>> It makes me sad that they don't see a market in inter-operability. If you're certain of the benefits of your software over another, then it's a real sign of confidence to be able to export and import to and from all of the alternatives.
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> If I'm not mistaken completely for the better part of its lifetime LilyPond was considered the last exit of a one-way street, i.e. it was considered useful to convert documents *to* LilyPond, but who would ever need anything *after* it ...
> Fortunately this attitude isn't that strong anymore, but still the resources to change the situation are missing.

If output to MusicXML is the solution, then it's clearly solvable. But this relies on the big boys implementing good import routines - and when submitting things to a publisher, I'm not sure how much reformatting they do but I would expect none. Which is the point of my prior post... It's dangerous to export to a format of which you can't independently test the validity.

Chris