Questions about MusicXML

For me the Expanded upgrade would be worth it for the MusicXML support but only if it is a serious attempt to support it. The announcements are a little thin on details. So I have some questions. Hopefully someone has answers.

1. Music XML is supported for export but can it be imported? My preferred use would be round trip - Sonar to scoring then back to Sonar.

2. What version of Music XML is supported. Version 3.0 came out in August. Does Sonar support V3?

3. MusicXML is available as an XML DTD or as an XML Schema (XSD). Does Sonar export with an explicit declaration for one or the other? This is not a trival question because DTD does not support XML namespaces and some kinds of downstream processing could be difficult if you export the document with a DTD declaration. On the other hand if you export with a schema (XSD) declaration you can later on create aggregate XML documents mixing multiple schemas. I would hope that there is a preference or option to control this.

4. What products has the feature been tested against? I use Notion3 and Sibelius6. I would be really disappointed if Sonar's MusicXML exports do not seamlessly integrate with Notion and Sibelius import.

5. A big problem I have with midi export/import is that the notation programs I import into do not always preserve chords correctly in a piano part. Midi cannot distinguish chords from multiple voices because midi does not provide for the notion of a chord. This leads to a big mess for me to clean up in the score. A series of 4 note chords interspersed with two note chords leads to a bunch of unneeded rests. The importing program persists in using 4 voices in this part. It could be 4 flutes for all it knows. MusicXML appears to provide the extra information that the importing program needs.  There are <chord> tags and also <forward> and <backup> tags to control the music counter from advancing with each note of the chord). Will Sonar actually use these features? And has it been tested? Otherwise I'm not going to save any time over a midi export/import.


BTW, at the time I wrote this the website for Recordare, the publisher of the MusicXML format, lists software that supports MusicXML but Sonar is not listed yet. http://www.recordare.com/musicxml/community/software

I appreciate that the Sonar team has many use cases to support so I'm happy to see the XML support. Sonar can't do all things well. So I bought Notion because Sonar is not a scoring program. I use TuxGuitar because Sonar is not best with tablature. Now if I can tie them together with XML I'll be a lot happier.

We have now updated our MusicXML software page at the Recordare site to include SONAR. It's listed in the beta/prototype section until the release starts shipping.

Note that regarding issue 3, MusicXML's XSD definition is not in a namespace - otherwise the DTD and XSD versions would be incompatible. The difference between a DTD and XSD is primarily in import, not export. Since this release only exports MusicXML files, I would be very surprised to see an option relating to DTD/XSD differences.

I agree that if we starting now we would use an XSD or Relax NG schema to define the MusicXML language, and include namespace support. However, MusicXML development started in 2000 so DTDs were the only workable option at that time.

A MusicXML file is a MusicXML file. You can validate it against the DTD or the XSD and the post-validation structure is indeed the same. The same code and stylesheets work whether you validate against a DTD or XSD. That's why it makes no sense for SONAR to worry about DTD vs. XSD when it comes to MusicXML file export; it's only a consideration during MusicXML file import.

There's lots more information about MusicXML at http://www.recordare.com/musicxml, including signup for the MusicXML developer mailing list.