hi Gregory, thank you for your imput, 2005/12/12, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>om>: In short: I want not only "proffessionals" to add their information, but also people with little knowledge of music. This is very hard with Lilypond. Please take a look into http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/talk:Wikimusic_II for further discussion we already had. If there come a lot of edits, it'll be hard to determine if a edit is okey or not. I'm not saying it has to be done the way I mentioned, but that we have to think about it. There are even more small projects on the web, and the few I found, probably not even 10 % of them, don't have the infrastucture I would like to see in a wikimusic-like project. For example, they seem to have no talkpages, they seem to have no recent changes, they seem to have no "real music" files. They don't have possibilities for entering musin in an easy way as well, nor a way to find the music you search, as a non-musician. I just hope so much that the music will no longer be limited to a small group of people, that everybody can enjoy it. I hope so much that if I have a tune in my head, and I want to find out whitch one it is, how it is calles, and who composed it, I can easely find it. Through a WikiMusic. I really recommend you to take a look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/talk:Wikimusic_II , because some of the things you mentioned are already discussed over there. (As well as some legal issues). If you think there might be some problems, please add them. greetings, Effeietsanders

Took me some time to answer, sorry for that. 2005/12/12, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>om>: We could add a function, for example, in whitch you have a keyboard on the screen, so people able to play a sound, but cannot handle the notation, can enter it into the database. I would like Lilypond to be the standardformat, maybe I wasn't clear about that, but I want more options to edit it. Dfferent interfaces, drag- and drop functions, so people with very little knowledge of music can reproduce a sheet of music, if they have it on paper to the screen etc.For you it might stay easier to edit directly into lilypond, but I think there are a lot of people not able to, and I would love this project to be as open as a wikipedia. Possibly the restriction could be editing the sheets, that could possibly be resptricted to a certain group of users. And further: The Wikimusic I have in mind is not just sheet. It's also text, plain text (as for the anthems now in wikisource and/or wikipedia) and information *about* the music, so written in XXXX by YYYY, interpreation etc. (information now found in wikipedia sometimes as well. But that belongs as well in this kind of database. But I can think that some information wouldn't fit in WIkipedia, but would be wanted in a Wikimusic.) but also playeble music. So if someone can play piano, (s)he can play it, record it, and upload it. I'd love it to be multiple versions, one with piano, one with violin, maybe in different qualities. That are in my view the keys for a succesfull wikimusic. Asking to justify will be hard, just as in Wikipedia it is already hard. Asking with every edit for justification will be the neckshot for a starting project. But as there is this newfunction in the software, semiprotection, that might be a good way to semiprotect automatically all sheets, with (maybe) the exemption of the original uploader? Just some policythings to think about. I think talkpages will be usefull, because this will not be a imagedatabank. There will be more. There will be four kinds of data in every "entrence", at least (if it's a perfect "article"), and also information about, so discussion will be wanted. If you want justifications, you need talkpages. You can't discuss through summarylines, as some people think... ;-) I saw it on some other websites already happening. you could add a Parsons' code in the mediawiki. for more information about that: see the projectpage. great :) i hope you understand me well: there has to be done a lot of things before such a project can start, because there are needed a lot of additions in the sftware, as i see it. I sincerely hope that the "technicians" will be looking to those points as well, which changes might have to be made, etc. That's an area I can't work on, as I have very little understanding of the complex MediaWiki-software. Greetings, Effeietsanders

Gregory Maxwell wrote: I haven't been heavily involved in the open-music community, but I've attended a few academic computer-music conferences on and off, and the people I've met are somewhat ambivalent about Lilypond. Basically, the main complaint is that it's intended to be a music-*presentation* language (or music *typesetting*), not a music-*representation* language. This makes it hard to use for a lot of things, like automatic manipulation, transformation to ther formats, and so on. It also makes it relatively hard to edit, since you have to specify a lot of the nitty-gritty presentation details yourself. Of course, it's a poorly-funded area with only a relatively small body of interested people working on software, so there aren't many good replacements. There is one system called GUIDO, that was promising but still very early the last time I heard about it; it may have a release by now, but I don't know of it. One problem is that most people who are interested in this sort of functionality just give in and use Sibelius or Finale, both fairly full-featured but proprietary commercial programs---an "open source Finale" hasn't yet appeared. There is also an MPEG working group trying to develop an open standard for music representation, but it works slowly. The main stumbling block, besides being a working group in the first place, is that music representation is a much harder problem than it seems at first---there are a *ton* of variations in how people have written scores over the years, many of them conveying substantive information that needs to be captured somehow. -Mark

Gregory Maxwell wrote: That's not actually the MPEG group I'm thinking of. The one I had in mind is the Ad Hoc Group on Symbolic Music Representation, which is attempting to come up with a consensus symbolic-representation format. Some of their publications discuss in some more detail why this is a difficult problem, and why existing systems do not solve it: http://www.interactivemusicnetwork.org/mpeg-ahg/ -Mark