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MusicXML

by jesperlang on 11/29/23, 1:13 PM with 72 comments

• by Tokkemon on 11/29/23, 3:43 PM

  I work for Sibelius so I'm heavily involved in this world. MusicXML is a great standard and offered a solid basis for data interchange between music notation programs. But now there's a new group working to build a successor standard, MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/

  It was originally going to be in XML but they recently switched to JSON, which is a good move, I think. I can't wait for it to be adopted as it will give so much more richness to the data set.

• by AdmiralAsshat on 11/29/23, 3:03 PM

  MusicXML is old hat. All the cool kids are using MusicJSON now.

  EDIT: I'd like to clarify that I posted this comment, as a joke, before the below comment went on to clarify that there was, in fact, a JSON-based rewrite of the music standard in progress:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38460827

  Never change, tech world!

• by jonathrg on 11/29/23, 3:43 PM

  I have not had much success using MusicXML to switch between different notation programs. Trying to read a score exported from Musescore as MusicXML in Sibelius or vice versa feels worse than switching between Microsoft Office and other ostensibly compatible formats.

  Does anyone have any success stories?

• by Rochus on 11/29/23, 6:33 PM

  Anyone remembering IEEE 1599? Seems to share a lot of goals.

  And there are actually a lot of alternatives, e.g. ABC notation, Alda, Music Macro Language, LilyPond, to name a few. Difficult to decide which one to prefer.

• by rooster117 on 11/29/23, 6:55 PM

  I've relied on this format to store songs in my iOS app for years. Representing notation is an interesting problem to solve.

• by 1-6 on 11/29/23, 3:37 PM

  Seems like MusicXML is a great format for ML applications. You need to start somewhere and machine-readable code is important.

• by DonBarredora on 12/1/23, 4:30 PM

  Dear god, stop using XML already.