Missed this on the original thread.

Jack Campin

Maybe since Bryan's already written an ABC converter he could adapt it to output MusicXML instead of Noteworthy format?

Perhaps "as well" rather than "instead". I like a challenge but I'm not sure that I can see enough use to me to motivate me.

The problem I found with writing the ABC/Noteworthy converter is that ABC is a mess. Lots of different developers went off and wrote their own programmes introducing their own ideas and idiosyncracies, often in completely incompatible ways. I wrote the original version according to the 1.6 definition and it worked fine on the test data. Then I tried it out on real world data and spent the next few months rewriting it.