I work for Sibelius so I'm heavily involved in this world. MusicXML is a great standard and offered a solid basis for data interchange between music notation programs. But now there's a new group working to build a successor standard, MNX: <a href="https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/</a><p>It was originally going to be in XML but they recently switched to JSON, which is a good move, I think. I can't wait for it to be adopted as it will give so much more richness to the data set.
MusicXML is old hat. All the cool kids are using MusicJSON now.<p>EDIT: I'd like to clarify that I posted this comment, <i>as a joke</i>, before the below comment went on to clarify that there was, in fact, a JSON-based rewrite of the music standard in progress:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38460827">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38460827</a><p>Never change, tech world!
I have not had much success using MusicXML to switch between different notation programs. Trying to read a score exported from Musescore as MusicXML in Sibelius or vice versa feels worse than switching between Microsoft Office and other ostensibly compatible formats.<p>Does anyone have any success stories?
Anyone remembering IEEE 1599? Seems to share a lot of goals.<p>And there are actually a lot of alternatives, e.g. ABC notation, Alda, Music Macro Language, LilyPond, to name a few. Difficult to decide which one to prefer.