I asked a programmer friend who’s also a musician if something existed to that would render a musical score in a web browser. Neither of us could find anything.
What I’d like is some sort of easy way to display sheet music in a browser. That way musicians could post their work and others could make clean (and correct) printouts of the music to play themselves. The format could be XML, or some HTML cousin, or perhaps the music could be in MIDI format and the browser could render that.
Does this sound useful to any musicians out there? Anyone good with Java?
See http://www.musicmarkup.info/scope/markuplanguages.html
Recordare’s MusicXML appears to be the leading xml dialect. NIFF is the closest the commercial guys have come to non-xml interop, but has not taken over.
Currently there are tribes of markup users or program users. Uneditable music is available in least-common-denominator form as pdfs.
Look to http://www.cpdl.org/ for a large selection of formats, some commercial versions of which apparently have plug-ins.
For batch-oriented purposes most effort has gone into variants on TeX (MusiXTeX, PMX, M-Tx), or abc (as simple as it sounds) or lilypond (currently most interested in ‘beautiful scores’ with fairly simple input). Lilypond the language has evolved, however. Backward compatibility is not given. These systems scale to some level of multi-part support (lilypond in particular is being tested at orchestral and massive-piano levels) with flexible support for things like transposition, multiple-parts-per stave, etc.
There are utilities to move MIDI to abc and abc to simple lilypond. These automatic translations mostly end up being tweaked manually; see http://www.laymusic.org/music-publish.html
–Derek Lane
Thanks a lot, Derek! This gives me some cool things to check out.
Thanks for visiting MT.Net, too!