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by reikonomusha 1510 days ago
At least in Western classical music, there's a lot of emphasis put on Urtexts (scores that contain exactly the information the composer wrote and no more), composer intent, distinguished voices (stem up v down), diatonic scales (enharmonic choices matter), etc. This would make it nontrivial to simply switch notations.

In some sense it's like saying "finally, I can read Don Quixote in whatever language I want because of Google Translate!"

1 comments

IMHO that's a very bad example because there's a big loss of information with Google Translate (you wouldn't get the Urtext when translating back), but there isn't with Clairnote.
Yeah, if the original score is digitally encoded such that everything really is a first-class citizen (and not, say, a GIF of some scribbles) -- a very big if -- but if so, it's not obvious that any information has to be lost in translation to Clarinote, nor that Clairnote would impose any additional information. If you want to know the scale you could encode the key signature, which Clairnote seems to make possible, just unnecessary.
From the earlier reply:

distinguished voices (stem up v down)

That's a very important one that might not survive across re-transcription. Although in this case, Clairnote is similar enough that it might generally be possible to retain all the stem directions.