# Music format for longevity



## d.healey (Aug 31, 2015)

What do you think is the best file format to preserve your notated music for the future, PDF, ABC (lillypond), XML, others?


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## almound (Sep 1, 2015)

A variety of formats, I would think. Personally, I use PDF and SIB. Now that you mention it, porting it over to a free format such as ABC wouldn't be a bad idea. Any utility that you know of to do such a thing?

Also, I am careful to record the results in both audio and video formats (WAV and AVI), with the video depicting high-def real-time sheetmusic playback.

In addition I keep a copy on good quality (acid-free) paper in the form of a print-out. Finally, I liberally distribute my music on various Internet repositories, such as Youtube and ISMLP.org, but then again whatever I write is under a Creative Commons License 4.0 (noncommercial) which makes it easy.

Your question is a good one. Even after all my (obsessive) archiving, I still am not convinced I have prepared for all eventualities. It is a certainty that the work of many composers of the past has been lost, in part or entirely, due to their relative obscurity. (No one cared enough to preserve the paper.) No reason to think the future will be any less unkind.


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## d.healey (Sep 1, 2015)

I've seen software that converts XML to ABC so exporting from Sibelius to XML and then to ABC is a possibility. I don't Sibelius is a good format to preserve music because it's proprietary, it's a shame though because I like the versioning feature. I think perhaps XML is the best format because the files are small, the format is easily parsed by lots of different software and even if all the current software that opens them were to become extinct and the format abandoned (unlikely in the near future) it would be possible to build a parser using the contents of the file (or a print out) as a guide. PDF is also good but future manipulation requires it to be scanned in with something like photoscore or be transcribed into a sequencer or notation program manually. MIDI with meta data is also a possibility but I don't think it's the best option.


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