MakeMusic Forums

Hi Phil, You can arrange MusicXML so that the parts are output one at a time, or the measures are output one at a time. But you cannot do this in-between representation that you suggest here. It is probably syntactically OK, but it goes against the semantics of the MusicXML spec. The id attribute in...

For those not on the Recordare announcement list, Dolet for Finale 1.0.5 and MusicXML 0.6c are now available at: http://www.recordare.com/downloads.html The big news for Dolet for Finale 1.0.5 is support for Finale 2003's tablature notation. Support for pop and jazz music is also improved in other w...

Hi Graham, For MIDI compatibility, the equivalent of MusicXML's divisions is stored as a 14-bit number. So for the most general use, it would probably be good not to use exceed 16383 for the divisions value. You can clamp it to a lower value if you like. When Dolet for Finale exports to MusicXML, it...

As Paul mentioned, XML was designed explicitly to avoid the "browser war" issues that plagued HTML. If you are validating an XML file, you must report an error if there is an unrecognized tag. We do have a couple of general-purpose elements in MusicXML that can serve as placeholders until some areas...

Hi Nick, I've just been using divisions = 960 throughout every piece I export to MusicXML. Is there any reason *not* to do this? A value of 960 won't handle septuplets and other more complex tuplets with an exact number of divisions. But one could argue that with a sufficiently high <divisions> valu...

Hi John, #4 (computing the divisions for the whole piece using a least common denominator) is basically what we do when we export MusicXML from Finale in our Dolet plug-in. But for what you're doing, #3 (switching divisions mid-file for more complex tuplets) or a variation on it should be OK. The Do...

Hi John,

There's currently no way to specify a hidden key signature in MusicXML, so what you're doing (just <alter> elements, no <key> or <accidental>
elements) is correct.

Best regards, Michael

We can certainly add more modes to the definition of the <mode> element, especially now that we have several programs that want to use this information. Currently only "major" and "minor" are defined in the MusicXML spec. To that we could add: dorian phrygian lydian mixolydian locrian Would it be he...

Hi Nick, Yes, you are getting away with this because of the interaction of how Dolet and Finale handle beaming. You should not expect other MusicXML readers to give you the same results, especially if those programs have more graphical internal structures than Finale does. Accepted MusicXML practice...

Hello Chris, Perhaps you could store a full MusicXML document for a canonical document type, and then store XSLT transformations for differences between the canonical and current document? The alternative would seem to be to work with MusicXML fragments to mix and match different notation elements. ...