Re: Reasons why a LilyPond-to-MEI conversion should be developed

[Urs Liska]

Am 24.10.2015 um 08:04 schrieb Andrew Bernard:
> While MEI may be ‘universal’ in intent, it is just an open source project. 

But a project backed by a very distributed, connected and publicly
funded academic community.

>Since lilypond is open source, it would make sense for the open source 
>community to cooperate.

The MEI community does agree upon this, and at least parts of the
LilyPond community do so too. It's just that every now and then we see
tendencies that people are afraid of opening LilyPond up to anything
that might seem "professional" ...

> 
> But how many people use MEI, and how much traction has it gained?
> Is it universally favoured? 

The question is not so much about the number of people but the "weight"
they have. MEI is the de-facto standard of the "digital music edition"
branch of academic musicology. And it will be the core of the "edition"
branch of future musicology. As such it is used by a significant number
of universitary (and also free) projects all over the world.

I am quite sure that for any serious musicological application MEI is
*the* format and MusicXML is no competition.

These insitutes do in general (I'd suppose "all" but I can't tell for
sure) work towards free software and open access to the results of their
research. So they are quite naturally our "friends".

There is the possibility that MEI *may* become a solution for pressing
problems of the publishing industry too, but I would consider this as a
secondary aspect. However, LilyPond being part of the game would raise
the chances of this happening anytime, creating options for paid work
for LilyPond users on the long run.
As said this is a secondary consideration at the moment, and anybody
whose email client's "non-free" filtering rule has produced a red flag
now please simply ignore this paragraph instead of ranting against the
idea of using LilyPond in commercial contexts.

> In other words, is consideration of this project worthwhile to begin with?

Definitely.
MEI is the future of academic music editing, and LilyPond is going to
fill a crucial gap in their toolchain. If not they will surely find
*something* someday.
I'll go into more detail on some aspects when replying to Simon's post.

Urs

> 
> Andrew
> 
> On 24 Oct 2015, at 10:39, Simon Albrecht <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Interesting thought. I should be surprised if MEI were to consent in granting 
> LilyPond this honour (as which I’d consider it). Given the ‘universal’ intent 
> of MEI, they might not want to ‘take sides’ with LilyPond (as opposed to 
> other typesetting software) in such a complete and definite way.
> 
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-- 
Urs Liska
www.openlilylib.org