[adrianh]

This is a common complaint, and it's something we're trying to remedy with MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/

Music notation is incredibly complex, and there are many places things can go wrong. There's a wide spectrum of error situations, such as:

* The exporting application "thinks" about notation in a different way than the importing application (i.e., it has a different mental model).

* MusicXML provides multiple ways of encoding the same musical concept, and some applications don't take the effort to check for all possible scenarios.

* Some applications support a certain type of notation while others don't.

* MusicXML doesn't have a semantic way of encoding certain musical concepts (leading applications to encode them as simple text (via the words element), if at all.

* Good ol' fashioned bugs in MusicXML import or export. (Music notation is complex, so it's easy to introduce bugs!)

[saltminer]

> MusicXML provides multiple ways of encoding the same musical concept, and some applications don't take the effort to check for all possible scenarios.

This sounded interesting, so I went to the webpage, and found this point specifically called out:

> It prioritizes interchange, meaning: it can be generated unambiguously, it can be parsed unambiguously, it favors one-and-only-one way to express concepts, and multiple programs reading the same MNX file will interpret it the same way.

But I'm curious to see some examples of this. https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/comparisons/musicxml/ provides an interesting comparison (and calls out how the same MusicXML can be interpreted in different ways for things like octave shifts), but it would be nice if the page also included alternate ways that MusicXML can represent the same composition and talk about how certain programs end up misinterpreting/misrepresenting them. The Parts comparison, for instance, mentions how you can represent the same thing in two different ways in MusicXML (score-timewise and score-partwise), but only provides an example for one (score-partwise), and doesn't go into much more detail about if this leads to ambiguity in interpretation or if it's just making things needlessly complex.

[adrianh]

Thanks, that's good feedback — will add that to the to-do list.

Just to give you a quick response: look into MusicXML's concept of a "cursor". Parsing a MusicXML document requires you to keep an internal state of a "position", which increments for every note (well, careful, not every note -- not the ones that contain a "chord" subelement!) and can be explicitly moved via the "backup" and "forward" elements: https://w3c.github.io/musicxml/musicxml-reference/elements/f...

For music with multiple voices, this gets easy to mess up. It's also prone to fractional errors in music with tuplets, because sometimes software chooses to use MusicXML position numbers that aren't evenly divisible into the rhythms used in a particular piece of music. That can result in a situation where the MusicXML cursor gets to a state that doesn't actually align with any of the music.

[saltminer]

That sounds like a nightmare to deal with, I'm surprise you don't mention this in the comparison example for multiple voices.

Another suggestion: you highlight the MusicXML elements being discussed in blue, but not the MNX elements. Especially on the longer examples, highlighting the relevant MNX elements would be nice.

[adrianh]

Thanks, that blue highlighting is definitely on the to-do list!