Again and again I have the problem of how to place lyrics in the music. Some songs have no repeats but e.g. three lines of text - then you know there are three verses. Other songs specify repeats and therefore the syllables of lyric-lines should be coupled to repeats. Many have both verses and repeats and evens nested repeats. (and segno and coda - I am just sitting with a Beatles songbook with nested repeats, segnos and codas).
A single number is not sufficient to tell where the lyric syllable belongs in the music.
It is quite simple to fix this in the next version of MusicXML:
The lyric number can be specified as this:
"x.y.z" where x is the verse number, y is the outer repeat and z is an inner repeat. E.g. the number "3.2.1" specify third verse, second repeat and first inner repeat. If there is no inner repeat just "3.2" is sufficient and if no repeats at all "3" is OK. A zero could mean "all".
I don't know how to address this - whether somebody does not like the solution. The result in the MusicXML_file could be:
<lyric number="3.2.1">
but it could as well be:
<lyric verse-number="3" repeat-number="2" inner-repeat-number="1">
The important thing is to get a solution on this problem. So that lyric text can be put the right place in the music. What do you think?
Kind regards
Mogens
PS: Both Musescore and Finale gives a warning specifying this line - but reads the file:
<lyric number="2" verse-number="3" repeat-number="2" inner-repeat-number="1">
