–I know most of the products, many of the people behind those products and Michael Good, the inventor of MusicXML.

As to what to use, when and how, it’s dependent on your source material, your target (BIAB in this case) and your willingness to roll up your sleeves and make it work. There are many times when I’ve gone through all the steps to realize at the end it would have been faster just to enter everything by hand while other times scanners/readers can save a tremendous amount of time.

That you don’t read music puts you at a disadvantage, no matter what you use. As you have already read, nothing just “does the job” without editing or tweaking in some fashion.

MusicXML is a toolkit, not an application. How well it works depends on how well it was implemented by an app’s development team (PG Music in this case) and which tools are being used. Although the protocols are now up to version 4.0, I don’t know of any scan/conversion tool using it beyond 3.0 which means there’s a lot of functionality that it just does not support. People who use MuseScore, for some reason, can’t stay away from dotted slurs but xml 3.0 can’t handle them—the result is a mess and I might as well enter everything by hand..

Case in point. Encore 5, an old notation app that some of us know, supports MusicXML version 1.1 (Win) or 1.3 (Mac) — it exports a few text elements but no lyrics or expressions. If the file was exported to pdf, PDFtoMusic Pro can read the font info and export as .xml 3.0 including expressions and lyrics. I can open that file in Finale and don’t need to do much tweaking.

Most products have a 30 day eval. PDFtoMusic Pro Has a different limitation—it doesn’t time out but you can only export one page per session without paying. Many have user boards etc. so check them out.

BIAB 2025 Audiophile Mac
24Core/60CoreGPU M2 MacStudioUltra/8TB/192GB Sequoia, M1 MBAir, 2012 MBP
Digital Performer11, LogicPro, Finale27/Dorico/Encore/SmartScorePro64/Notion6 /Overture5