I certainly hope Mr. Oppenheim will continue with the level of effort and insight that Dr. Gonzato has provided. There is a great deal of ABC encoded music already available but a solid 2.0 standard will encourage musicians and composers to encode long and complex ensemble scores for everyone to share. ABC encoding began, I believe, as an easy way to share simple music containing a single melody line on a single staff. (That's the way it's used in the Digital Tradition database and here in these threads.) The idea is so beautifully simple and easy to master that, very quickly, people wanted to use it to share more complex scores.

The big software publishers (e.g., Coda Finale) probably won't include ABC translation as part of their products but it seems likely that they will adopt a standard notational exchange format like the XML-based MusicXML. At issue, I think, is whether an exchange standard should support all possible performance details for accurate MIDI and digital sound reproduction or merely the notational details needed to produce an engraved score. Once the ABC 2.0 standard is complete, we'll soon see utilities that address all the details of conversion between ABC and MusicXML. I think it's unlikely that MusicXML will become popular as a native format for music programs but it does have the potential to become the lingua franca of the music software community.

GNU LilyPond is a system for encoding music that was designed from the start to support complex orchestral scores. LilyPond's emphasis is in the creation of beautiful looking scores so every aspect of music notation is supported in some way. LilyPond is layered over Donald Knuth's TeX typesetting system and Leslie Lamport's LaTeX macro library so it has available to it what is perehaps the world's most sophisticated typesetting system. Thanks to this layering of tasks, it is possible with LilyPond to typeset any sort of musical document from simple lead sheets to symphonic scores to complete books where text and music lines are interspersed. And because of the underlying TeX/LaTeX foundation there is support for title pages, tables of contents, bibliographies, indices, graphics; in short, anything you've seen in a book, magazine, academic paper or commercial score.

Of course the power of LilyPond comes at a price. Not a price in cash outlay, it's all free, but a price in terms of the effort and level of computing knowledge needed to install, maintain and use the software. You can't beat LilyPond for engraving beautiful music but you're probably not going to use it to share fiddle tunes.

      - Mark