Re: Suggestions for participating institutions?

[David Kastrup]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling <address@hidden> writes:

> And, sad to say, it wouldn't surprise me if this call has been issued
> in anticipation of a preconceived product development by Sibelius
> (despite UK office defunct-ness), Finale or Steinberg, in
> collaboration with already selected academic partners ...

It might even make sense to try getting Steinberg on board.  They have
just acquired the old Sibelius developers.  Now the focus I see for
LilyPond itself is bringing it into line for operating it with a growing
corpus of public domain music.  We'd bring in music academic partners
for the sake of entering music into a MusicXML based database.  We'd
want to move to a Mutopia 2 web framework that makes it easy to check in
music in either LilyPond or MusicXML form.

We would extend LilyPond to be able to directly export MusicXML and use
MusicXML as an input language.  Scores submitted to the "Mutopia 2" in
LilyPond format would be available in newer versions via convert-ly.
Verification of proper convert-ly could be done by comparing the
resulting MusicXML, if the conversion failed, at least delivering the
MusicXML as proper LilyPond files are, due to the continuing evolution
of the language, somewhat precarious as a long-term archival format.

Defining standard MusicXML readings of LilyPond files and, if necessary,
at a later point of time defining convertible newer format versions that
would be convertable forward (and back?) with a more reliable mechanism
than convert-ly would also be necessary.

For the whole XML-centric and web-centric workflows we'd have a
significant amount of convertibility from cash into results (those are
mainstream frameworks and as such there are capacities on the free
market).

Getting LilyPond and MusicXML into a closer relation and providing end
user accessible web entry inputs would be possible by players like
Scorio.com, and Philomelos, and they have quite a bit to gain by getting
a larger corpus of LilyPond-friendly MusicXML into their grasp.  If we
can get something like Steinberg into the same boat (without sinking it)
for playing a more generally useful MusicXML game, this could also be
interesting.

This could move to a very big framework of a reliably archivable
MusicXML version and surrounding free toolchains, with other notesetting
programs being able to compete on their own merits on the same publicly
accessible MusicXML database.

One would need to flesh out work flows and dependencies of particular
milestones and targets in order to arrive at a good distribution of
tasks and competency.

-- 
David Kastrup