MusicXML DTD Hits 1.0; Browser Support Next?

base_chakra writes "Two years since its initial release, the MusicXML music notation document type has finally reached v1.0. MusicXML is an (you guessed it) XML-based musical score format developed by Recordare LLC, and derived from the MuseData and Humdrum projects. Although MusicXML was quickly adopted by virtually every major music notation software products available, a standard non-binary format for rendering music notation on the web is something that's still sorely needed. Despite its unfortunate limitations, will MusicXML eventually become the de facto means of rendering music notation online, or will it fall into obscurity like so many document types?"

you guessed it?

"XML-based musical score format developed by Recordare LLC," how could i have guessed that?

MathML too

I never heard of this before. Really cool. I also like MathML as an XML format, too bad its support isn't great all over.

Guitar Tabs?

I'd just like to be able to read guitar tab files from guitar sites..

http://www.guitartabs.cc/home.php
http://www.my songbook.com/
http://www.guitaretab.com/

I found KGuitar, but it's pretty early.. I'd like a Gnome app but I can't find anything decent. Any ideas?

-Mitti

Great!

Music and XML, two formats I can't read worth a damn coming together in one great package...

I guess it's time to read up on XML and learn what all this hoopla is about! <g>

---
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

• -- George Bernard Shaw

Re:Great!

Here is your first lesson:

Write this: I guess it's time to read up on XML and learn what all this hoopla is about! <g>

Like this: I guess it's time to read up on XML and learn waht all this hoopla is about! <g />

Re:Great!

Funny, I always spell "what" properly when authoring XML documents..

Easy answer

If the format is open and free, then it has a good chance of becoming widespread. Otherwise, no.

Thanks for asking.

Re:Easy answer

Examples of widespread file formats:

• MS Word
• MS Excel
• MS Powerpoint
• Macromedia Flash
• Autocad DWG (if you're into engineering)
• Adobe Pagemaker
• Quicken data files

I'm sorry to say, but marketing seems to have a much more profound effect on the spread of a file format than its openness and freedom.

Re:Easy answer

From the AC:

Hrm, did you mention HTML and PDF?

HTML I'll give you as a well-supported open standard file format. PDF, not as much, but better supported than the MS formats.

I suppose for balance, supported documented file formats would include:

• JPEG
• HTML
• CSS
• Mpeg video
• RTF
• Text (duh)

And, for further comparison, well documented open formats that somehow just don't seem to be as widespread as you might hope:

• TeX
• PNG
• Postscript
• The slashdot favorite Ogg Vorbis or just plain OGG

A blanket statement really can't cover all the possibilities. It just seems that despite the advantages to open formats, the market just doesn't seem to care right now.

What about MIDI/MOD/XM/etc?

Not only MIDI and MOD are free, open formats, so do the tools that make and play them! Why bother for another format, when binary ones are doing the job greatly? Besides, storing music in text formats are too bloated to be useful anyway.

Re:What about MIDI/MOD/XM/etc?

Read the FAQ linked above: "Before MusicXML, the only music interchange format commonly supported was MIDI. MIDI is a wonderful format for performance applications like sequencers, but it is not so wonderful for other applications like music notation. MIDI does not know the difference between an F-sharp and a G-flat; it does not represent stem direction, beams, repeats, slurs, measures, and many other aspects of notation." For musicians, this is a big deal

read the FAQ

Not only MIDI and MOD are free, open formats, so do the tools that make and play them! Why bother for another format, when binary ones are doing the job greatly? Besides, storing music in text formats are too bloated to be useful anyway.

From the faq...

[...] Before MusicXML, the only music interchange format commonly supported was MIDI. MIDI is a wonderful format for performance applications like sequencers, but it is not so wonderful for other applications like music notation. MIDI does not know the difference between an F-sharp and a G-flat; it does not represent stem direction, beams, repeats, slurs, measures, and many other aspects of notation. [...]

In short MIDI knows nothing about music notation. It can not render the music score that it is playing for you, on your computer screen. There full answer is in the FAQ. I suggest reading that.

Re:What about MIDI/MOD/XM/etc?

Actually it addresses the need to have music represented...rather than just sounds. It's the difference between a movie and a screenplay. The movie is the finished product...that's nice. But the screen play tells What actors are doing, why the camera is there, etc...

It will do for music what CSS & XHTML with metatags do for printed text...Right now sheet music is still the standard for music notation...it's not couducive to archiving or sharing [sans simply scanning the paper copy] Imagine having the musical equivelant of Google where you can find a song by just a few notes...MusicXML allows you to develop that!

Once those tools are set we can take on plays, speech, and eventually source code too! This is one of the first really original uses of XML...what it was created to do!

SVG First

We still can't get good SVG support in a browser (unless you have IE on window/mac and Adobe's plugin installed). I can't imagine supporting MusicXML in the browser before SVG... besides, once SVG is supported, XSLT should be able to transform MusicXML to SVG, SVG Print, or PDF.

Doh...

I guess that means my phpRecipeML program is going on the back burner. :-(

lets give XEMO a hand

The XEMO [xemo.org] Project is a venture to get a sturdy MusicXML studio/rendering application.

The project seems dead or near death right now, but it would have been a great tool for teaching music in schools. Especially if it turned out like Guitar Pro [guitar-pro.com].

Guitar pro is not free and uses a proprietory file format. But it is an excellent way to learn guitar by "playing along" with the pros.

What about ABC?

There already is a fairly widespread musical notation format in use on the web. It's called ABC [gre.ac.uk]. There's even a Sourceforge [sourceforge.net] site for it.

That said, ABC isn't perfect - it's evolved in many ambiguous and incompatible ways over the years, making it difficult to code a common parser. MusicXML might be better suited for that job, or for professional use.

For casual use, though, ABC is tough to beat.

Eww! More web page background music!

Why are they putting support for this in the browser? For web page background music and advertising jingles?

A good thing for Mozilla?

If Mozilla and other open source browsers implement a workable rendering engine for this, it may encourage others to give Mozilla a shot where they otherwise wouldn't. Of course, IE would follow at some point if they found out people were switching, but at that point people will have hopefully seen the light. (For all I know, mozilla already has it... kitchen sink and all that).

I don't know what kind of audience would really care about music notation, but I know there are a bunch of us guitar-wanna-bes who frequent good ol' ASCII-art notation sites for our favorite songs, which are obviously lacking in detail. And word can spread quickly if people are notating using this format and recommending a proper browser to view them with.

Here's hoping...

Re:A good thing for Mozilla?

Of course, IE would follow at some point

• 12-08-2008: MSIE 7.2 released, capable of using MusicXML
• 13-08-2008: MSIE 7.2.1 released, includes patch in MusicXML rendering engine that fixes a crash when looking at Celine Dion sheet music. Both fans of Celine Dion are relieved.
• 18-09-2008: First remote admin exploit found in MSIE's implementation of MusicXML. Involves Shania Twain music.
• 26-03-2009: MSIE 7.2.2 released, fixes issue due to Shania Twain music by refusing to show Shania Twain music. Shania Twain herself inprisoned under the DMCA for exploiting MSIE and never heard from again. World peace becomes a reality.
• 03-04-2009: MSIE 7.2.3 released, includes patch in DRM module of MusicXML rendering engine so that you can only look at sheet music of songs you paid an additional $ 24,95 for.
• 08-06-2009: RIAA claims enermous losses due to MusicXML.
• 12-09-2009: RIAA sues twelve year old girl using illegal MusicXML printouts to learn to play piano.
• 13-11-2009: MSIE 7.2.4 released, includes patch in MusicXML rendering engine that fixes a crash when showing a specific chord.
• 12-01-2010: Duke Nukem Forever released simultaneously with HL4, Doom6 and The Sims expansion set nr 834.

Unfortunate Limitations

I think they are being very reasonable with their licensing structures.
1: The Format is fee-free provided you follow the license
2: The software is not free/OS. SO? Not everything should be free. I am ALL about OO.o and Linux, and whatnot, but trying to claim that all software should be free is just stupid, and giving list "unfortunate limitations" jab is unfair.

Would you prefer the XML format they designed to be GPLed? Wouldn't that make it useless? Everyone could modify the format and then you wouldn't have a standard format?

-lv

p.s. Here come the GPL flames. Bring it on!!!!

Re:Unfortunate Limitations

How is their standard not free? (I don't mean their particular application; I don't care one way or the other about that.) I didn't see any particular gotchas in the license; they say they want it to catch on as widely as possible, that they want as many applications to use it as possible and that they don't care if you want to make your application open source. The only possible thing I can think of is a hidden patent, but using XML to represent discrete events (notes) would seem kind of obvious, no? There must be tons of prior art.

Or is there some kind of zealots' vendetta going on, of which I was not previously aware?

Lilypond

I used to love Lilypond [lilypond.org]. You do have to think in LaTeX to use it, but once you get over it, the output is fantastic - looks like an expensive professionally published score. The output from most other nice GUI Windows/Mac programs always looked slightly on the cheesy side.

So it looks like now I could take Finale-produced XML output, run it through xml2ly and get my Lilypond sheet music. Has anyone tried it?

Hoping for the best

I'm skeptical, but hoping for the best with this one.

There is a clear need for a better way to share music notation. At wikipedia [wikipedia.org], there has never been a consensus so TeX generated by Lilypond or something similar is used. That works poorly, because it is hard to integrate with CGI, and without integration only users who have Lilypond themselves can contribute.

Same set of problems at composerplanet.com [composerplanet.com], though they are still getting their site together and haven't chosen a strategy. Looks like .PNG and .JPG images will be the de facto standard. Ick.

Lilypond is free, and runs on Linux, but is unlikely to become much of an interchange standard because the UI isn't accessible to the vast majority of musicians, who are as a rule not experts on writing something according to a context-free grammar. Besides, Lilypond is best for typesetting-quality layout, at which it does indeed excel.

Whatever the solution becomes, the ability to share scores with ease will touch off another wave of handwringing among sheet music publishers. I just yesterday received a book with all of Scott Joplin's piano music in it -- all written before 1915 -- and guess what? It says right on the front page that it is against the law to copy them! So far, most musicians don't know any better, but if MusicXML comes to pass, that may all change.

Re:Hoping for the best

Somebody shuold mention the Mutopia Project [mutopiaproject.org] here, and I gues I'm the guy to do it.

They have been at it a while converting old editions and manuscripts. Help 'em out if ya can!

They've currently got 387 pieces of music going, and they're adding more and more quicker and quicker.

Lillypond

And what was wrong with Lilypond's format [lilypond.org]? I know it's not that pretty [lilypond.org] but it works and is unencumbered. Was it because it wasn't buzzword compliant [xml.com]?

Re:Lillypond

What people don't get about music, is that defining formats is quite trivial. The hard part of music notation is actually generating it.

I've been working on LilyPond for the past eight years, and we're now finally reaching a stage where the output can be taken seriously. I estimate that it took over 4 man-years of work to develop the current source code (60k lines of C++, 10k Scheme, and 10k python). Of all that source, less than 10 % is concerned with the file format, and they form the easy bits. When it comes to notation, file formats are not the problem.

If you want to read more in-depth information on notation vs. music representation , I recommend to read the essay at lilypond.org [lilypond.org].

Regarding buzzword compliancy: have a look at our XML format [lilypond.org], but like I said: the format is besides the point. Han-Wen (LilyPond author)

The trouble with XML

It makes files so absolutely huge. Even something like "A" is a least 14 bytes, whereas in a binary format, it would probably be 2 at most (identifier byte and note byte).

Binary formats, while harder to design for extendibility when using this sort of data, are a lot more compact.

Well, maybe it's not that obscure, but...

will it fall into obscurity like so many document types?

pcx is hardcore

Er... What about...

MIDI

Whlie it's nice to have XML-based information transfer, sometimes it isn't really the best and is incredibly big for what it does. For live music playing, the simplicity of MIDI is a much better substitute for transcribing music into a 'non-binary' format.

Oh, it works with lots of electronic musical devices too - er... most of them in fact!

Browsers? Why over PDF?

I can't imagine why you'd need "browser support" for this, as opposed to PDF. PDF already does all the proper font embedding, as music notation programs rely heavily on customized fonts. Rendering music is incredibly complex, way more so than text.

I do my scores [tringali.org] in PDF, if I want people to be able to read and print them. Yeah, the PDF is a bit ugly on screen because of Finale's strange linestroke style, but it prints out just fine. I also use ps2pdf.com, the scores do look much better with Acrobat.

(Note all of my more complex scores are not on the web. I usually only print out copies for those I give out or sell to, and rarely send out the electronic masters. People might photocopy my scores, but I'm sure not going to make it any easier for them.)

Now, if someone wants to play back the score, or edit it, then they need the actual .MUS (or .ETF) file from Finale. The only time I've ever needed this when collaborating on a score with a friend over email. It's really difficult because there's no way to merge changes or diff them.

Saving to this format would be handy, because I've been compelled to upgrade a few times when working with someone who has a newer version of Finale than I do. Unlike Word, my friend cannot simply say "Save As..." and select an older file version!

But unless they retrofit it into older versions of Finale, oh well...

Unfortunate limitations...?!

I read both of those links.

As far as I can tell, the MusicXML license is just a BSD license. Give credit where it's due for the DTD and you can use it wherever you'd like. I really don't see the limitation there...

Just because it's not GPL doesn't mean it's useless.

Sounds like something me and a friend use

http://musicscript.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]

Go to the site and check it out.

Here is a description:

MusicScript is an open-source music scripting language for linux. It is capable of creating complete songs from a script, using drum machines, synthesizers, samplers, and many effects. MusicScript was created by David Piott as an alternative to the limits of real-time music programs. With MusicScript, there can be an infinite amout of loops, tracks, samples, effects, etc. You create the song as a script file, which MusicScript will interpret and turn into a wav file Its a very basic program but it gets the job done and is very easy to learn. We also got this to compile in fink and work perfectly in OSX. So now we use it in Linux and OSX

not all its cracked up to be...

MusicXML does not really go past very basic score representations. Most modern (i.e. > 20th century) notations are not possible. Its like saving a complex MS word document in .txt format, its mostly useless.

Re:not all its cracked up to be...

Meanwhile, if I sit down with Finale, I can have it done in an hour.

But then you're stuck with Finale's output, which is mind-numbingly uniform and, thus, vastly more difficult to read in performance than Lilypond's more beautiful output. Yes, true. I'm not talking about in pop stuff or other simple music, but in music that is complex enough so that it must be read in performance. John Cage, one of your examples, created music that is inherently difficult to memorize; it is unpredictable enough that it cannot be reduced to pattern or algorithm. (Generally, Crumb and Schwantner, two more of your examples, are not difficult to memorize.) Since there may well be more reading going on in complex music than in simple music, in complex music, like Cage's music, the quality of the score become very important.

Music engraved by experts is better than Finale output because it is easier to read. Well-engraved music provides all sort of visual cues to help a performer play the correct notes in the correct rhythm, keep his or her place on the page, etc. A sort of visual grammar has evolved over centuries of engraving, and even nexperienced musicians respond to it with hardly a thought.

The Lilypond programmers seem to have done remarkable work in parsing this grammar and deriving rules, then using the grammar to improve score output. Finale and Lilypond are night and day in terms of ease in reading.

I am a musician who performs a lot music of the last fifty years--Crumb, Cage, and Schwanter, among many others. I have used Finale regularly since 1989. I tried Lilypond a year ago, and I won't be going back.

Standards....

Lets not forget MIDI and other non-proprietary formats. There are many free utilities/applications using these formats. Do we really need yet another 'standard' "standards: everyone should have their own" to confuse matters?

Mozilla Support

On bugzilla.mozilla.org, this is bug 192409.

Mozilla does not support XML for musicians
Status Whiteboard: BLOCKED: needs a spec, a comprehensive test suite, and a reason to implement it

Well, we have a spec now at least. Unfortunately, this bug is dependent on bug 39965 (Layout should permit pluggable support for new frame types), which is currently not assigned to any developer.

What about Flash

Don't just think about inate browser support... I know that flash is a dirty word, but musicXML + flash + hardcore programming could potentially mean a neat application that would allow people to browse sheet music online and print good reproductions. Don't condemn it just for being verbose...

It'll make the 'black page' easier to write..

I did ethnomusicology for a couple of years. I shared the class with final year music students.

One of the exercises was to listen to some African drum music and write it down in notation.

I bombed completely, but the dedicated music students wound up producing something reminiscent of Frank Zappa's 'black page drum solo'. It wasn't the 'easy, teenage, New York version' either.

There are some forms of music that simply cannot be expressed in western music notation and I found that intensive training in this format actually reduced people ability to comprehend non-classical-western derived music.

Oh and those final year music students frequently seemed on the verge of nausea when listening to certain asian or native american music.

designed for research/librarians - not the public

Take a good look at the format. Its a spec defining how to digitize musical scores. When was the last time you went looking online for the score of a particular website? Whe was the last time you went looking online for a score that you could legally download?

This is an important protocol - for all those projects out there digitizing old music scores. Think classical music like Beethoven/Mozart. Up until recently, everyone in this buisness made their own homegrown system. Just to give a taste of where this project comes from:

• Humdrum Toolkit [ohio-state.edu] - a toolkit used by Stanford, Ohio State, and some other universities
• Finale [finalemusic.com] one of the first visual score editing programs. Proprietarty format hacked by researchers.
• Score [scoremus.com] the 800 lb gorilla ofthe market. Music publications use this exclusively.
• GUIDO [salieri.org] - another notation system developed for and by researchers.

These are just the standards I know of. This [acadiau.ca] site lits many more I've never heard of. Hopefully MusicXML obsoletes these countless competing standards so those who research in this field can finally exchange data with one another - without porting around and maintating a collection of converters.

However, this really is irrelevant for the vast majority of slashdot readers. Unless your trying to digitize musical transcriptions, this standard is a curiosity at best. I have to wonder why it made the slashdot front page.

Oh really...

...a standard non-binary format for rendering music notation on the web is something that's still sorely needed...

Really? I'm a composer and performer and I have never felt the lack... This is an advantage for me how?

Where is this perceived need to render music notation on the web coming from?

Ultimately, a waste of time. I'm not going to laboriously code up my music into MusicXML format, that's completely insane:

Is it easier than writing out the music, scanning and posting the scan? Not if I allready can read and write music... In fact, I'm incurring the overhead of learning an additional language on top of msucial notation in oder to do this. Most songwriters can learn to operate a scanner and a paint program in an hour, how long to reach that level of expressiveness in MusicXML? I suggest the learning probably never really stops...

Oh, I see, there is a program I can use to graphically handle the creation of the score. Oh, well that's so much better than using a program that could convert the same score to MIDI, which the person you want to exchange info with could then use to either obtain the original score, or play it back, or both simultaneously.

There is no advantage here, IMHO these folks learned standards development in Redmond... If you wanted a useful thing, how about a plugin for webservers that could render a MIDI file to readable score? That makes a bunch more sense.

Was there a need for this format? I suggest not. The existing formats, allthough binary handle the job quite nicely. MIDI for example is stable and mature. Not only that it is supported by the companies which make equipment for songwriters and musicians. What MusicXML implies is that there is something wrong with the standard, which is patently false. It is at best poor programming practice to re-invent the wheel, which is what MusicXML aims to do.

Truly the need is a way to render standard music format on the web. Okay, turning MIDI into standard music format is trivial, and allready being accomplished in many devices, and by many programs. What was needed was a way to display the output of this decoding algorithm to a web page, not to invent an unneeded standard.

Really the only purpose I can see for this standard is to sell software which supports it. The fact that no other industry standard equipment is likely to support it shouldn't deter you, look at M$. If enough people do something the wrong way, it still can become a standard.

I agree - MIDI is it!

I will add my voice to the chorus - MIDI is it and this is a solution in search of problem that it will not find. As for the problem of MIDI not being able to record a live performance and produce sheet music - who cares? After working with MIDI for over ten years, the only problem is that it cannot keep up with the nances of a great electric guitarist (SUPRISE - it was a keyboard language!) and only 16 programs and 128 voices. Both can be solved with an upgrade.

But none of this really matters to web pages! The latest Quicktime synth is awesome if programmer correctly but like most MIDI synths these days, it is in desparate need of some nice expressive electric guitar sounds. Let the engineering go where it is needed, PLEASE!!

And hey - whatever happened to MPEG-7 Structure Audio anyway???

And yet, another thing to buy a book for.

Well, time to whip out the plastic and buy yet another book for another standard that is going to be used... one day.

Alternate Musical Notation?

This reminds me of something I discussed with my friend recently. She's played a bit of music in the past, and being the scientific type, was baffled as to why we refer to musical notes in the way we do. Twelve semitones, but we use seven letters to refer to them, with all those odd sharps and flats? And all the ridiculous bandwidth we waste by having two or three ways of describing each one (double sharps and flats, anyone)? All sorts of nonsensical stuff.

Of course, it all originates from the design of the harpsichord (I think. Don't quote me on that), but surely in this modern age of open standards and such, some visionary must have come up with a more elegant* alternative. Does anyone know of one?

*though clearly, not necessarily more functional. This is standards we're talking about here.

As a musician....

I would not put anything out there as XML. If I'm giving away something I worked on, I make a PDF of it, so then I am SURE what it will look like. Musicians are picky. I'm picky. I like to have my scores/parts/music look good. I'd lose that ability to be sure it is going to look if I put it in XML or whatever format.

The other thing I would do would be to give the files that I used to create the music. In my case, it's Finale [finalemusic.com]. But, I have YET to do that. I like to retain some sort of credits for doing the work. PDF allows me to do that. And if they want to hear it, creating an MP3 of a score is simple as well.

problems with musicXML

musicXML's own web site describes it as useful for "common Western musical notation from the 17th century onwards." well, great. so i can't annotate unusual Western classical music, or popular Western music, or classical Japanese music, or even Gregorian chants? perhaps this will truly be useful for some people, but those of us looking for an abstract solution (!) cannot be satisfied.

technically, the schema is heavily dependent on then nuances of specific classical instruments and the 12-tone scale. i think that any *modern* scheme will represent other tunings and timbres.

SMDL is the Real Deal

The real deal is SMDL - Standard Music Description Language, an SGML based language under dev now since forever. This is a closed and proprietary XML system from a group that has spammed me for years.

More info - http://xml.coverpages.org/smdlover.html

Calling the Ricordare system Music XML is like calling ALICE AIML.

http://alice.sunlitsurf.com/alice/aiml.html

Thanks for all the interest!

Wow - thanks for all the interest. Especially in such a specialized area like music notation!

Folks outside the field may not realize that MusicXML already works with the two market leaders in music notation software. Finale can both read and write MusicXML files, while Sibelius can write a more limited type of MusicXML. The Finale support is currently Windows only, but we are busy working on the OS X port. MusicXML is already second only to MIDI in its adoption by music notation applications. It's nowhere near as universal as MIDI (yet), but it's a lot more complete for music notation!

One point that seems to have been missed in the discussion is that standards can reduce the barrier to entry for innovative applications. With MusicXML, you can use programs like Finale as your "notation engine" handling the standard parts of music editing and display, while your own application more innovative work. So electronic music stands like MuseBook Score use MusicXML for input, while algorithmic composition programs like JMSL use MusicXML for output. More details about MusicXML support are here [recordare.com].

Re:Two years from now... the patent surprise!

"Seriously. Does anyone believe "standards" created by companies?"

Yeah, those at Microsoft do.

Re:That depends...

How the hell is this a troll? This question must unfortunately be asked about ANY supposed standard now. How many times have we seen someone attempt to patent some sort of standard that had been presumably open? In this case, I could more realistically see some record company trying to patent this as opposed to Microsoft.

Re:MusicXML code is bloated, useless

No, he is not trolling. He has asked the only deeply relevant question in the thread.

"Why?"

And it turns out there's really no good answer other than just taking a ride on the buzz train.

On the other hand there are a ton of reasons why XML stinks to high heaven as a musical notation format.

You'll find a short but humorous look here:

Music XML [dbdebunk.com]

Now here's an example of a plain text encoded note that I just semi made up on the spot:

g"4

Human readable. Machine interpretable. And musician readable. A violnist could learn to sight read a score in this format in a matter of minutes.

I doubt a violinst could parse the XML for a single note. Hey, but at least the code takes up a quarter page.

If you need any clue as to how valid XML is for this sort of work consider the fact that people are making hardware XML accelerators.

For plain text files.

I'm sorry, but could you please stop the train? I want to get off.

KFG