[MEI-L] Sibelius and MEI

[Andrew Hankinson]

Hi all,

TL;DR version: I've written a Sibelius plugin that will read and write MEI. If anyone's interested in working with me on this, let me know.

In June and July I was a visiting researcher at UVa, working with Perry on software support for MEI. While I was there I came across an open-source MusicXML Sibelius plug-in which, although defunct, inspired me to write a plug-in to read and write MEI from Sibelius. Given the current thread subject, I thought it would be a good time to make it known more widely.

The source code is here:

https://github.com/DDMAL/sibmei

The structure is:

-- libmei.plg  <- a Manu-Script version of libmei. Also includes an XML importer/exporter.
-- meigui.plg  <- GUI code for dialogs, etc.
-- meisib.plg  <- Code for reading MEI into Sibelius
-- sibmei.plg  <- Code for writing MEI from Sibelius.
-- sibmei_test.plg  <- Unit tests for sibmei

It is highly, highly unfinished code. The writing of MEI is mostly complete, but there are a few missing features (like lyrics) that I have not had time to add. 

The reading of MEI is almost non-existent. In a way the hard part is done. Right now it will successfully read an MEI (XML) file into a Sibelius data structure, but any actual layout of the musical content is waiting to be finished.

Note that this will probably only work on Sibelius 7 too.

You'll also notice that the GUI has quite a few place-holders for features that I didn't have time to implement. I envisioned this as a way of producing digital editions based on certain editorial practices in Sibelius. For example, the inclusion of variant readings, or supplied symbols, etc. None of this works yet, but I thought it would be a pretty valuable tool.

As I've got quite a bit on my plate right now, I don't really have time to work on this. If, however, it's valuable to someone in the community please feel free to hack away at it. All I ask is that you contribute your code back.

Cheers,
-Andrew