If someday I publish my score (though this is absolutely far-fetched as of now), it takes some courage to save one's original work so dear to oneself in a format people seldom use and cannot open, even if LP was (or is) that good. When people publish, publishers seldom let writers or composers edit source on their own, but call for a format they can handle. The possibility is remote that a rare format like LP's will be approved. Indeed, there is a library that enables LP to import music XML as LP format (see: importing Music into LilyPond from LP's blog). LP producing music XML (see possible output formats in LP manual)-this seems to be impossible. Moreover, my initial impression is that Music XML files are extremely verbose (perhaps for sake of unambiguity?), and one is unlikely to manually edit them. And it is not clear to me that how can Music XML save my tweaking of slurs and other minute details intact. The chance that "someone will write a commercial parser for Sibelius or Finale," if they are abandoned by their current owners is precisely zero. These file formats are undocumented and covered by intellectual property agreements. #FRESCOBALDI VS DENEMO FULL#Īlso, the file formats themselves do not provide a full description of what the score looks like on paper - to do that, you would also need to reproduce all of the logic built into the programs themselves (which is also commercially confidential, of course). On the other hand, Lilypond is open source software, so everything is available at no cost to anyone with the time, patience, and expertise to make use of it. Lilypond is certainly being actively developed. If you subscribe to the developer list, you will see almost continuous activity. If you want to preserve scores "for ever", the best option is to save them in as many different formats as possible. The PDF format for computer documents isn't going to die any time soon, and is much more widely used than a specialist niche like music publishing.
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