Originally Posted By: "jazzmammal"
....rewrite and that is a huge task....

May be, but looking to the effort they put in every new release it is a piece of cake in my opinion...If you can generate a PDF file it's just another "simple translation" to an XML file. The real problem seems to me that the music XML format is not implemented correctly or completely nor by PDFtoMusic or by Notion which will result in e.g. reading C7 instead of CMaj7 and C7 instead of C7b9 or C7#9. And C instead of Csus. My experience with programs like Sibelius and Finale is zero, but my experience with Notion is growing every day.

I have been anylizing what happens with the generated XML files from BIAB pdf's by MuseScore and PDFtoMusic if they are used as input for Notion. I use just one page files filled with single staves, 8-15 systems with mostly 4 measures (or 5 with lead in) each, since that's how most of my BIAB files are built up. I tried to figure out what goes wrong and why it goes wrong. For that I studied the XML files and look how they did translate all the chords translations. To understand the proces I used as reference the standard from musicxml.com/for-developers/ defined in musicxml30.zip (see file: direction.mod)

For me it is important that I get an almost a 1:1 result compared to the original BIAB pdf if I export the Notion results as pdf file for use in forScore or iGigBook or any other pdf reader. Having that result, in Notion on the spot any file can be transposed including the chords to any key and you can send the result as pdf file to yourself (by email) or a colleague musician. How easy it can be!

So what did I notice?
1.
First of all the job done by PDFtoMusic is great for notes after importing it in Notion, but not perfect. It includes basic chords and some of the other text-like stuff like title, tempo and remarks. I had far less problems with PDFtoMusic correcting notes then with the MuseScore results directly generated from .mgu files. Notes from PDF2Music are perfectly reproduced, only some red 'extra notes' will pop-up in Notion showing a conflict due to missing ties between notes. But the corrections are very fast to implement in Notion. After that a perfect 1:1 result is available concerning the note representation. Chords are a different issue. In principle the simple chords are all correct. But many possible chords additions are not interpreted by PDFtoMusic. MuseScore does a perfect job, they seem to be specialized in recognizing BB chords. However none of the chords additions are read by Notion. So in fact this perfect translation does not help a lot. Many chords with additions are not translated by PDFtoMusic. However adding and changing some chords is an easy task in Notion.

2.
Notion cannot interprete there own generated extra chords additions after exporting it as XML. Those additions are also not read by Notion anyway from other XML files. So chords like C7b9 and C#b9 are not read by Notion but all translated into C7. Notion reads "major-seventh" as C7 while it should read CMaj7 which is a basic mistake. Notion interprets "major-minor" as CMaj7 while it should read CmMaj7. So CmMaj7 cannot be interpreted by Notion. Since CMaj7 is used a lot in all XML I replace automatically "major-seventh" by "major-minor". That's saving a lot of work in the corrections.

3.
The job from MuseScore XML for notes was too bad for Notion (all separeted notes in Notion), no text like tempo and remarks is translated so it was not interesting for me to investigate this any further. Additionally the batch job which can be used in PDFtoMusic is great for converting a whole directory with BIAB pdf's!

This are my first impressions. From this forum I hope to learn a few things:
1: Are there other (better?) PDF to XML programs worth tryïng which might interprete both notes and chords better?
2: Does anyone have similar experiences? And/or really use XML translations a lot with good results?

Conclusion:
Using PDFtoMusic to translate the whole directory with all my BIAB pdf files into XML is just one press of a button. Using a "find and replace program" can prepare all XML files for a better Notion result concerning CMaj7 with, again with one press of a button. All XML files can easily be imported via Dropbox into Notion. Then a check and correction is needed for each file correcting some chords with additions. Deleting sometimes some red marked notes. Adding several new note ties and deleting the short BIAB note ties which are wrongly translated into a mercato or fermata above notes. All corrections are pretty easy and fast to implement. The results are on the spot transposable files at your iPad for notes and chords.

Musicians and music publishers are still wasting too much paper...come on men we live in the digitised age...Wake up!