What should we expect with regard to Music XML import from a Sibelius 7.1.3 export? I am seeing some things work really well, and other things not at all, still others work sometimes.
What works well: note pitch and duration, slurs, and other note markings, tempo, meter, grace notes, trills etc.
What doesn’t work at all: technique text to playing techniques (e.g., pizz., arco, progressive, etc.)
What works sometimes: dynamic markings. I have one score where this is very erratic. I have another score where this imports perfectly. When I isolate individual sections where this doesn’t work, then it works fine. So it’s likely something in the score is messing it up. But these import correctly back into Sibelius.
Playing techniques are at quite an early stage and we’ll be working on improving these very soon.
Dynamics are a tricky one as it’s hard to get a balance between importing them as a Dynamic Group (which groups dynamics that are close together in time so they are level vertically), and allowing them to adapt locally (eg so they can shift out of the way of stems, etc). In MusicXML there’s no such semantic structure which can make it hard to do the Right Thing (whatever that is…). It is often a quirk of rhythmic positioning whether they import as a group or not, which is why it appears erratic.
So what would explain why when I isolate a section the dynamics import correctly but in the full score they do not. I basically just copied a passage to a new score and exported that passage. The passage imports perfectly with regard to dynamics. But in the original score, many of the dynamics were just omitted on import.