News

Today we have released version 8.3 of our free Dolet^® 8 for Sibelius plugin. This version adds support for new features available to plug-ins when used with Sibelius Ultimate 2022.12 and later:

• Dotted and thick barlines are now exported.
• The “Wings on repeat barlines” engraving rule is now used while exporting repeats.

You can download the plugin from our Dolet plugins download page or from our open source GitHub repository. If you have any questions about the plug-in, please start a GitHub discussion or raise a GitHub issue.

With my retirement coming up this Friday, this will be the last version of the plug-in released by MakeMusic. Further development will take place in the open source community. While MakeMusic provides the Dolet for Sibelius repository for the convenience of open source developers, it will not be maintaining or supporting the plug-in.

As we announced earlier this month, the Dolet^® for Sibelius plug-in for exporting MusicXML 4.0 files from Sibelius Ultimate is now open source. Today we have made the source code publicly available on a GitHub repository at:

https://github.com/MakeMusicInc/DoletSibelius

The repository includes the code history from version 8.0 onwards, including the individual changes made for version 8.2. It is also set up with GitHub Issues and Discussions to help facilitate open source development.

Note that while MakeMusic provides this repository for the convenience of open source developers, it does not maintain or support the plug-in.

We hope that making this repository available will help extend the usefulness of this alternative method for exporting MusicXML files from Sibelius Ultimate.

Today we have released version 8.2 of our free Dolet^® 8 for Sibelius plugin. The big news is that this plug-in is now open source. This version is released under the MIT open source license, rather than the more restrictive licenses used by MakeMusic and Recordare in the past.

Although Sibelius plug-ins all ship as source code, this does not make them open source. Earlier versions of the Dolet for Sibelius plug-in were released under licenses that did not permit modification or redistribution of the plug-in. With the MIT license, these and all other uses are now permitted.

With my upcoming retirement from MakeMusic, the company will no longer be maintaining or supporting the Dolet for Sibelius plug-in. Making the plug-in open source allows the community to maintain and improve this plug-in without relying on MakeMusic. MakeMusic plans to soon provide a public GitHub repository for the Dolet for Sibelius sources for the convenience of the development community.

Version 8.2 also includes the following new features and fixes:

• Figured bass is now exported. However, figured bass that changes under a note and figured bass extensions are not yet exported.
• Text tracking is now exported.
• The percussion clef glyph is now exported.
• The octave-down treble clef glyph is now exported if it differs from the commonly used treble clef with an 8 below.
• Changes to octave-transposing clefs now take the instrument transposition into account when exported.
• Exporting the end points of ties that start on tuplets has been improved.
• Exporting the end points of cross-staff slurs and glissandos has been improved.
• Exporting flat symbols in part names has been improved.
• Exporting text that changes to a music text font midway through has been improved.
• TAB clefs no longer export a line element.

You can download the plugin from our Dolet plugins download page. You will need a free account at our MakeMusic site to download the plugin. If you have any questions about the plugin, please feel free to reach out on Facebook or Twitter.

Today we have released the first maintenance update for our free Dolet^® 8 for Sibelius plugin. This update includes the following features and fixes:

• Headers and footers are now exported. As with other page-aligned text, positions are based on common default house styles since plug-ins cannot access text style definitions.
• The page number wildcard is now exported. (Regular Sibelius page numbers are still not exported due to ManuScript limitations.)
• The year of composition wildcard is now exported.
• The dynamic markings ffp, ffmp, fmp, fpp, msfz, and msfzp are now exported as dynamics.
• Standalone symbols for notes, noteheads, rests, augmentation dots, bar repeats, barlines, clefs, flags, and octaves are now exported.
• The Sibelius formatting string for turning off a music text font while retaining other aspects of string formatting is now exported.
• Page-aligned text with a repeated mix of words and dynamic symbols no longer exports with invalid MusicXML that other applications cannot open.

You can download the plugin from our Dolet plugins download page. You will need a free account at our MakeMusic site to download the plugin. If you have any questions about the plugin, please feel free to reach out on Facebook or Twitter.

We are happy to announce that Version 8.0 of our free Dolet^® for Sibelius plugin has been released today! The Dolet 8 for Sibelius plugin lets you export MusicXML 4.0 files from Sibelius Ultimate 2019.5 and later. The plug-in has also received a thorough updating to take advantage of new features added to Sibelius’s ManuScript programming language over the past several years.

We believe this updated plugin will make it easier for people to transfer their music from Sibelius into SmartMusic, Finale, and other music notation apps. Our previous version 6.6 was released nearly six years ago, and thus only exported MusicXML 3.0 files.

You can download the plugin from our Dolet plugins download page. You will need a free account at our MakeMusic site to download the plugin.

There are over 50 new features and fixes available in version 8.0 compared to our previous version 6.6 release. Here are 10 of the highlights:

1. Concert scores now export transposition information, including alternate clefs for transposed parts.
2. Concert scores with octave-transposing parts such as guitar and piccolo now export correctly.
3. Cross-staff notation is exported starting with Sibelius 2021.9.
4. Dynamic parts can be exported all at once using the new Export Parts to MusicXML menu item.
5. Page-aligned text is now exported, except for headers and footers.
6. Many more standard symbols are now exported.
7. System directions export with the system attribute, providing better results when creating parts from an imported score.
8. Text that mixes dynamics or musical symbols with words now export correctly.
9. Metronome marks with numeric ranges now export correctly.
10. Batch export no longer prompts for saving after each file.

You can read more about all the new features in the release notes and version history. If you have any questions about the plugin, please feel free to reach out on Facebook or Twitter.

Over the past few months we have been hard at work updating our free Dolet^® for Sibelius plug-in for exporting MusicXML files from Sibelius. It has been over five years since we last updated the plug-in. We wanted to take advantage of the new features of both MusicXML 4.0 and Sibelius’s ManuScript programming language to get better MusicXML files out of Sibelius. This should make it easier for people to transfer their music from Sibelius into SmartMusic, Finale, and other music notation apps.

To apply for the beta test, please fill out the application form. This will let us know what type of test coverage we will be getting in terms of both Sibelius versions and applications that will be making use of the exported MusicXML files. If accepted, you will receive information about accessing the beta versions during the week of November 29.

The Dolet 8 for Sibelius plug-in requires Sibelius 2019.5 or later. Restricting to later versions of Sibelius makes it much easier to support the plug-in and make use of the latest ManuScript features.

There are 50 new features and fixes available in this beta release. Here are 10 of the highlights:

1. Concert scores now export transposition information, including alternate clefs for transposed parts.
2. Concert scores with octave-transposing parts such as guitar and piccolo now export correctly.
3. Cross-staff notation is exported starting with Sibelius 2021.9.
4. Dynamic parts can be exported all at once using the new Export Parts to MusicXML menu item.
5. Page-aligned text is now exported except for headers and footers.
6. Many more standard symbols are now exported.
7. System directions export with the system attribute, providing better results when creating parts from an imported score.
8. Text that mixes dynamics or musical symbols with words now export correctly.
9. Metronome marks with numeric ranges now export correctly.
10. Batch export no longer prompts for saving after each file.

We hope that many of you will find this updated plug-in useful. Please consider joining the beta program to let us know how it works for you before we make the plug-in more widely available.

Last week the W3C Music Notation Community Group published MusicXML 4.0 as a W3C Community Group Final Report.  This is the first update to MusicXML since the Version 3.1 release 3½ years ago.

MusicXML 4.0 includes many major new features. It adds or greatly improves support for:

• Concert scores with transposed parts
• Relationships between score and parts, including a standard way to combine score and parts in a single compressed .mxl file
• Score following, assessment, and other machine listening applications
• Swing playback
• Roman numerals and Nashville numbers
• XML Catalogs
• Complete documentation on the W3C site, including examples of every MusicXML element.

In addition, there are many smaller changes for improving the semantics, appearance, and playback that can be represented directly in  MusicXML files. You can read more about the updates to MusicXML 4.0 in the Community Group Report and the GitHub issue list.

MakeMusic has been testing earlier versions of MusicXML 4.0 in our Finale and SmartMusic products for several months. Finale v27 will include MusicXML 4.0 support. SmartMusic already imports some of MusicXML 4.0’s new features.

We have updated the MusicXML web site for the MusicXML 4.0 release, including the alphabetical index and musical examples.  We have replaced the MusicXML 3.0 documentation, the MusicXML 3.1 tutorial, and the version history with redirects to the latest information in the W3C Community Group Report.

MusicXML is now supported by more than 250 applications worldwide. With the MusicXML 4.0 release we are making MusicXML easier for developers to use thanks to simplified, expanded, and updated documentation. The new features in Version 4.0 open up new areas for MusicXML application development and will improve accuracy for current applications. We look forward to seeing all the improvements in score exchange as more applications update their MusicXML support to Version 4.0.

Each week, the Scoring Notes Podcast hosted by Philip Rothman and David MacDonald looks at different aspects of music notation and music notation technology. They interview the people behind both the notation and the tools. Started just one year ago, they have become the go-to podcast for music notation news.

This week the podcast focuses on MusicXML as Philip and David invited me onto the show. The hour-long interview covers a lot of MusicXML history. What led to its invention, and how did it become so popular for score exchange? The episode concludes with a look ahead at some of the features coming in MusicXML 4.0.

It was great fun talking MusicXML with Philip and David. I hope that you enjoy listening to the podcast as much as we enjoyed making it!

It was 20 years ago today that MusicXML was first publicly presented to the world. On October 23, 2000, I gave a poster presentation on Representing Music Using XML at the First International Conference on Music Information Retrieval in Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA. This talk described MusicXML 0.1 and its early implementations for Finale, Sibelius, MIDI, and MuseData.

Ten years ago I took a look back at the first 10 years of MusicXML with both a blog post and an article on MusicXML: The First Decade. Today I’d like to look at how far we have come in the past 10 years. A lot has happened!

Double the Application Support

Ten years ago we had over 130 applications supporting the MusicXML format, which was already impressive. In the past 10 years we have nearly doubled that to over 250 applications.

There has been a lot of growth in web application support as well as mobile application support on iOS, iPadOS, and Android. Desktop app support continues to grow as well.

Once of the biggest categories to emerge over the past 10 years as been digital audio workstation (DAW) support. Where Cubase stood nearly alone 10 years ago, it has been joined by Logic, Digital Performer, SONAR, Reaper, and other apps today. DAWs now join notation editors and music scanners as categories where nearly every major app supports MusicXML.

More Consumer Sites

MusicXML’s main success has been as an exchange format between different applications. It has long been the standard when people work together with different apps to prepare written music for print, film, shows, and online services.

However one of the original goals was also to be a consumer format. We wanted musicians to be able to download interactive sheet music and use it in whatever application they like, not just the application where they first accessed the music. Copyright issues make this more complex than I appreciated 20 years ago, but there have still been breakthroughs in the past few years.

The original consumer sites for MusicXML files such as the Choral Public Domain Library focused on public domain sheet music. Today we also have licensed sites for downloading MusicXML files of copyrighted music. MuseScore.com is currently the largest of these sites, having made the transition from unlicensed to licensed since its acquisition by Ultimate Guitar two years ago.

We now know of over 20 sites that offer MusicXML files for sale, subscription access, or free downloads. These range from small sites with tens of files to large ones with either tens of thousands or over a million scores available.

More Functionality

Over the past 10 years we have released MusicXML versions 3.0 and 3.1 with major improvements in functionality. Version 3.0 added many improvements to playback, including a standard set of over 800 instrument sound identifiers. Version 3.1 improved support for the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) standard, including support for many more music notation symbols.

Development has not stopped there. We are currently working on MusicXML version 4.0, planned for release in early 2021. This will provide better support for concert scores, generating parts from scores, and more. Each release also includes many smaller changes to make moving music files between applications ever more comprehensive and seamless.

More Stable Governance

Ten years ago, MusicXML was owned by Recordare, a small independent company with limited resources. With the development of MusicXML 3.0 in 2011, it became clear that MusicXML needed a larger home to continue to grow.

The first new home was MakeMusic, the company that purchased Recordare’s assets in November 2011. MakeMusic provided the resources for this web site and for the MusicXML 3.0 online documentation. MakeMusic’s support allowed us to start hosting face-to-face meetings at the NAMM and Musikmesse shows. Other companies in the MusicXML community soon joined as sponsors.

Michael Good at MakeMusic’s NAMM booth in 2012

However, development of the format slowed down. People were more willing to collaborate with an independent company like Recordare than with a competitor like MakeMusic. Joe Berkovitz from Noteflight recognized this problem early on. He worked for several years to get MusicXML transferred from oversight by a single company to an independent standards organization.

We found a home in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Community Group structure. MusicXML development was transferred to the W3C Music Notation Community Group five years ago. This group was responsible for delivering Version 3.1 and for the ongoing development of Version 4.0.

Attendees at the first face-to-face meeting of the W3C Music Notation Community Group, NAMM 2016.

Membership in the W3C Music Notation Community Group is free of charge. You do not need to be a W3C member to join the Community Group. Click on the JOIN OR LEAVE THIS GROUP button on the group homepage to begin the process of joining the group and contributing to the ongoing development of the MusicXML standard.

Thanks

There are so many people to thank for the success of MusicXML over the past 20 years. When you put together a list like this you are always afraid of leaving someone out, but I will try anyway.

• My collaborators at Recordare – Geri Actor, Tony Berman, JoAnn Close, and Aaron Jacobs – for all their support in getting MusicXML off the ground and commercially viable.
• The people whose work inspired the design of MusicXML – Walter Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field for MuseData, David Huron for Humdrum, and Barry Vercoe for pointing me in their direction.
• The earlier adopters of MusicXML, especially Graham Jones at SharpEye and John Paulson, Mark Maronde, and the Finale team at MakeMusic in the early 2000s. Linking one of the top scanners to one of the top notation editors started MusicXML’s successful adoption. Market leaders can tend to prefer lock-in to open formats. John Paulson saw that nothing was going to stop MusicXML’s adoption and decided that MakeMusic should make the most of it.
• All the contributors to the MusicXML format over the years – through the Yahoo! group, the mailing list, the forum, and now the Community Group. Doill Jung, Curtis Morley, and their teams contributed key ideas to make MusicXML handle high-fidelity graphical rendering in addition to musical semantics. Don Byrd, Michael Scott Cuthbert, Didier Guillion, Bernd Jungmann, Mogens Lundholm, Mark Olleson, Donncha Ó Maidín, Christof Schardt, and Dominique Vandenneucker are among those who have contributed so much over the years.
• My colleagues at MakeMusic past and present. Karen van Lith, Karen VanDerBosch, and Beth Sorensen were key players in making the MakeMusic acquisition happen. Paul Carlson, Grégory Dell’Era, Gear Fisher, Fred Flowerday, Michael Johnson, Trent Niemeyer, Andy Stephens, Jonathan Tschiggfrie, and Jason Wick have provided management and project support.
• My co-chairs in the W3C Music Notation Community Group past and present – Joe Berkovitz, Adrian Holovaty, and Daniel Spreadbury. It has been a joy to work with them and the entire MusicXML community to make better music notation software standards. Better standards will keep growing the use and enjoyment of digital sheet music.

W3C Music Notation Community Group Co-Chairs Adrian Holovaty, Daniel Spreadbury, Michael Good, and Joe Berkovitz at Musikmesse 2017.

Yesterday MakeMusic released Finale 26.3 and an updated Dolet 7.6 for Finale plug-in. The MusicXML improvements for both Finale 26.3 and Dolet 7.6 for Finale include:

• Music written with percussion clefs using standard rather than percussion notation now exports correctly.
• Music written on 2- or 3-line percussion staves now exports and imports more accurately.
• Percussion notation rests set to a specific staff position now export and import more accurately.
• Custom Clef Designer definitions are now exported.
• Stacked chord symbols are now exported and imported.
• Measure numbers now export more accurately from documents with multiple measure number regions.
• Stems shortened to nothing using the stem length tool are now exported correctly.
• When notes display in other layers when rhythmic notation is applied, their stem directions now export correctly and articulations are displayed after import.

Finale 26.3 also includes a fix where MusicXML import no longer changes MIDI quantization settings.

As part of our continued MakeMusic technology modernization, the Dolet plug-in no longer supports Finale versions prior to Finale 2011 as of version 7.6. You may continue to use older Dolet versions with earlier Finale versions.

While MakeMusic has been continuously improving our MusicXML 3.1 support, the W3C Music Notation Community Group has started work on MusicXML 4.0, planned for release in 2021. Please join the group to contribute to MusicXML 4.0’s development, or watch the MusicXML GitHub repository to track our progress.

We hope that you find the improved MusicXML support will make moving your music files between applications even faster and more accurate than before. If you have issues using the MusicXML in Finale 26.3 or in using the Dolet plug-in, please let us know in the Finale portion of our Help Center.