I work for Sibelius so I'm heavily involved in this world. MusicXML is a great standard and offered a solid basis for data interchange between music notation programs. But now there's a new group working to build a successor standard, MNX: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/

It was originally going to be in XML but they recently switched to JSON, which is a good move, I think. I can't wait for it to be adopted as it will give so much more richness to the data set.

MusicXML is old hat. All the cool kids are using MusicJSON now.

EDIT: I'd like to clarify that I posted this comment, as a joke, before the below comment went on to clarify that there was, in fact, a JSON-based rewrite of the music standard in progress:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38460827

Never change, tech world!

I have not had much success using MusicXML to switch between different notation programs. Trying to read a score exported from Musescore as MusicXML in Sibelius or vice versa feels worse than switching between Microsoft Office and other ostensibly compatible formats.

Does anyone have any success stories?

Anyone remembering IEEE 1599? Seems to share a lot of goals.

And there are actually a lot of alternatives, e.g. ABC notation, Alda, Music Macro Language, LilyPond, to name a few. Difficult to decide which one to prefer.

I've relied on this format to store songs in my iOS app for years. Representing notation is an interesting problem to solve.

Seems like MusicXML is a great format for ML applications. You need to start somewhere and machine-readable code is important.

Dear god, stop using XML already.