Feature request: export to MusicXML format

[Trevoke]

'Cause that would be awesome.

[ Used to be "export to musescore format" ]

[refi64]

Can't MuseScore import MIDIs??

Wait...

(remembers how MuseScore loves to put 16th notes everywhere when importing MIDIs)

Nevermind.

[daveyarwood]

I've used and enjoyed MuseScore -- it's a nice piece of software. However, I think it would be more useful for Alda to export to a common format like MusicXML, a format that a wide variety of GUI programs (including MuseScore) can import.

[Trevoke]

Sold. Updating original request.

[daveyarwood]

👍

[0atman]

👍 can MusicXML be converted easily to a midi file? I bet it can. If so, I'm behind this 100%, two birds with one stone!

[daveyarwood]

I believe it can. I'm no expert on MusicXML, but from what I know, it seems like a kind of "lingua franca" that can be used to translate between different musical data formats.

[0atman]

wait, does this work already? http://alda.io/web-demo/

[0atman]

I think this issue is super important. Once we add even basic MusicXML support, we gain a bunch of features for free, for instance: We could go the music21 route and use LilyPond to do much heavy lifting, it's got commandline flags for converting between midi and MusicXML, and can even output score as pngs. I expect it has a bunch of other features that would be easy to integrate. Cross platform too!

[daveyarwood]

Our web demo is out of date, and uses a hacked-together JavaScript (via ClojureScript) partial port of Alda 0.6.4. Updating the web demo is a TODO item, but I think would be a lot of effort. It would probably be easier to add MusicXML support to the current version of Alda.

I totally agree that this would be a killer feature! One could also import/export Alda scores to and from GUI score editor programs like Finale and Sibelius. The possibilities are endless.

[0atman]

Ah, got it.
BTW, here's how music21 looks with LilyPond behind the scenes:
https://gist.github.com/0atman/3b5398eef04f497550560640c90e87ce

[daveyarwood]

Moved to https://github.com/alda-lang/alda-core/issues/3.