What is the word with Musescore scores and Dorico?

[ZeroZero]

What is the word with Muscescore scores and Dorico? I have a .MSCZ file on my desktop but it does not load or at least I have not been able to achieve it. I get “invalid parameter”.

Can this be imported?

thank you

Z

[mducharme]

That’s what MusicXML is for. Open it in MuseScore and export as MusicXML.

[ZeroZero]

XML loses a lot.

[benwiggy]

MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and Dorico – none of them open each other’s documents directly.

They all represent data differently, and require different processing of that data to achieve notation. For all but MuseScore, the data format is a company secret. Even with that knowledge, you would have to duplicate each app’s “engine” that processes the data.

This is why we have MusicXML. You should get the “notes” in, at least. (By which I mean notes, slurs, articulations, dynamics, lyrics, text, etc.)

[mducharme]

@benwiggy

For all but MuseScore, the data format is a company secret. Even with that knowledge, you would have to duplicate each app’s “engine” that processes the data.

Even though the code is open source, I believe unless you are doing so in order to create an open source product under the same licensing scheme, you can’t even do so much as look at the code to see how something works or you could be sued for infringing the license. So even if they could go through all the work to build a converter because they can see the code, they would likely get sued for doing so, for breach of the GPL.

[graffesmusic]

This seems highly unlikely.
A file format is not copyrighted.

Is it legal to reverse-engineer and reimplement a file format?

Note that there are (gpl3) mscz to musicxml converters on github.

[benwiggy]

Most EULAs explicitly forbid reverse engineering. But even assuming that the company lawyers are happy with the risk, that’s still only the first obstacle.

This from Michael Good, the creator of XML:

@MichaelGood

MusicXML files actually contain more engraving details than Finale files. A lot of how Finale displays music is determined by the program, not saved in the file. MusicXML files save all this information that Finale files don’t contain.

So not only would building a Finale converter be a huge amount of work, it would be a complete waste of time. It would make conversions worse, not better.

[klavierpunk]

@ZeroZero Can you tell us what exactly MusicXML does not preserve from what is present in the original MuseScore file?

[graffesmusic]

I was talking about “So even if they could go through all the work to build a converter because they can see the code, they would likely get sued for doing so, for breach of the GPL.”

[mducharme]

Hi,

That’s not what I mean. They could try to reverse engineer the format without referring to the source code at all, and that sort of converter would not get into trouble.

The other sort of converter that would not get into trouble is if a separate converter was released that was fully open source GPL3 from MuseScore to Dorico, and then whoever was building that could even freely use MuseScore code, copy and pasting from the MuseScore repository without issue. But that would not be built in to Dorico and it would have to be separate, and it would expose Dorico internals instead since it would have to be able to write a Dorico file (which would essentially make the Dorico file format open source as a consequence).

But any MuseScore converter built in to Dorico could not be made even looking at the original code that creates the file format without Dorico itself being made GPL3, otherwise it would violate the GPL3 license. I’ve looked into this sort of thing before, and the license affects not only verbatim copying of code but also copying of algorithms/procedures that might be involved, to prevent something like using the exact same code but converted to a different language.

This probably hasn’t been fully tested in court though, so whether it would hold up, I have no idea.