I was responding to the original poster who asked why MIDI was consistent and .xml wasn't.

I am very familiar with both MIDI and MusicXML and have been as long as both have been around. I am quite comfortable with what I wrote. I did not claim that they both encompassed the same functions although, on the surface, many do overlap. Many DAWs are now able to export .xml and a few, such as Logic and Reaper, can also import (ok, not very well but that should improve).

Here's the short answer: MIDI may have more ways of being communicated but it is still a simple protocol that hasn't really changed since the late 1980s—except for what Roland and Yamaha added in the mid '90s and that wasn't universally adopted.

MusicXML is a much more comprehensive protocol set that developers can implement in many ways. It will be interesting to see if MusicXML 3.1, due to be released in a couple of months, changes any of this.

The fact is that no two notation applications handle .xml files the same is not the fault of the protocol set but the way that it is implemented by application developers. MIDI, being far simpler, has much less leeway in this regard.

Last edited by Mike Halloran; 04/29/17 01:00 PM.
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