Standard Music Data Format

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oganter
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Standard Music Data Format

Post by oganter »

Hi IMSLP forums!

I am looking for some very general information regarding how publishers use music-representation data files to print sheet music.

Some backstory: I am looking for musical data. I am talking about computer files that represent the musical information of a piece. For example, the 'kern' file format, or the 'musedata' format (links below) store the data for the beethoven quartets, and more. From what I can tell these are academically motivated projects. Did those projects use a human being to create each of those files? Or is there a source file format?

My logic is this: for every sheet music printed, there must have been some music data software to create and render the image as it is seen on the page. I am familiar with standard MusicXML and NIFF filetypes, but I can't find databases for any of these. What filetypes do publishing companies use? Are they publicly available?

Ideally, I would like the whole Wagner ring cycle, or all 10 scriabin piano sonatas in a computer file just like those in the musedata project. Both these works exist as sheet music, so surely there exists representational computer data of those works. How do I get those files?

Thanks!

- OG

Link to musedata project: http://www.musedata.org/
Link to musedata data : https://github.com/musedata/beethoven-quartets
Link to kern data : http://kern.humdrum.org/
Link to NIFF data : http://www.music-notation.info/en/formats/NIFF.html

And here are some links to the kind of data files I am talking about:
Beethoven op.131 in muse data format: https://github.com/musedata/beethoven-q ... 131-01.msd
Beethoven op.131 in kern data format: https://github.com/craigsapp/beethoven- ... et14-1.krn
coulonnus
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Re: Standard Music Data Format

Post by coulonnus »

I hope I didn't misunderstand the topic, but the left and right columns of this table (in German) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von ... programmen tell you which music typesetting program the main publishers use.
coulonnus
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Re: Standard Music Data Format

Post by coulonnus »

oganter wrote:I am familiar with standard MusicXML and NIFF filetypes, but I can't find databases for any of these.[/url]
http://openmusicscore.org/ has scores in MusicXML. You might obtain more useful replies in
their forum. :-)
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