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Following the statement on the Home page that the new Encore will import/export Music XLM 3.0, I looked up, out of curiosity, the latest version. It said that 4.0 is the latest. Will the Encore code be updated to handle the new functions of Music XML 4.0?
I’m guessing not at first—Don has told us it will be 3.0. MusicXML 3.0 is supported by hundreds of applications including the various scanware and PDF converters out there including SmartScan products and PDFtoMusic Pro.
Very few companies went to 3.1 when it was released along with Finale 25.4 all those years ago (I’m guessing very few; I don’t know of a single one including Sibelius that did). MusicXML 4.0 was released with Finale 27 almost 4 years ago. Last I checked, only Sibelius is fully compatible and that’s because MakeMusic (who owns MusicXML) developed the Dolet 8 plug-in for them before Michael Good, inventor of MusicXML retired. MuseScore and Dorico are getting closer as they implement more features of 4.0.
MusicXML is not something that one just drops into an app. It’s a free toolkit that developers use to integrate the various features into their apps. As someone has liked to argue on the old forums, XML 1.1 (E5 Win) and 1.3 (E5 Mac) should have supported Lyrics and Expressions because the protocol did … true but Richard’s development team never implemented that functionality into Encore 5.
I will be happy even if the new Encore only adds the ability to export chords correctly.
Mike, or anyone, do you know any details about how the Music XML backward compatibility works here? For example, if an application exports Music XML 4.0 but the other application that imports it only supports 3.x, will the 4.0 file be imported correctly as far as it goes?
What I understand is that a new XML version is an upgrade to the old one, so that all old tags and parameters remain valid. There would be new tags, of course, but linked to functionalities which are newly supported – which are probably not the most used ones.
I’ll suppose that new markup tags, properly opened and closed, are due to be ignored by older levels.Similarly to html, where several levels peacefully coexist.
Mike, or anyone, do you know any details about how the Music XML backward compatibility works here? For example, if an application exports Music XML 4.0 but the other application that imports it only supports 3.x, will the 4.0 file be imported correctly as far as it goes?
The way it works with most apps is that a .musicxml 3.1 or 4.0 file can be imported but any new/incompatible features are ignored (or have weird results). Some apps will pop up a slew of error messages in the process but you just click through and ignore them. The .musicxml extension was new to 3.1.
Since I have Overture 5 and Finale 27 as well as Encore 5.0.7 on my laptops, I could always export a 4.0 file from Finale and import it into the other two to see what happens. I do this now and then with both Dorico and MuseScore to look at their progress on MusicXML.
Finale lets you select the level of .xml, .mxl (compressed) or .musicxml (3.1 and 4.0) version you want to export. When I don’t know what’s on the receiving end, I select .xml 3.0 in my Finale export preferences.
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