If, like me, you lived through the 1980s of the 20th century, you surely remember the great battle between the two giants of analog video tapes, VHS and Beta. As often happens, the format that prevailed was not necessarily the one of the highest quality, but rather the most popular, probably due to its more affordable price. Since then, in all fields related to technology, we have witnessed ups and downs among different brands and their formats. We still remember the Laserdisc, those huge vinyl-sized discs with a revolutionary design, and a format that was halfway between analog and digital. Over time, the Compact Disc (CD) became the standard for music, followed by the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) for video, and more recently, Blu-ray. Interestingly, all of them have gradually taken on a more residual role as collector's formats, devoured by the famous streaming. I myself admit that I often prefer to use Spotify to listen to my own records instead of having to go to one of my shelves, search for the album among the crowd, turn on the music system, insert the disc into the player, and hit Play.
In the early days of digital music notation, the most popular programs in the early 90s were Finale, Encore, and a little later, Sibelius. Over time, the first and the last of them gained prominence, leaving the second one in a lower tier, but once again we faced incompatible formats that were very difficult to share. As it often happens, this led to the creation of tribes, each considering themselves superior to the others or believing that their option was the unquestionably best one. The only way to share music between these applications was through the MIDI format, which allowed us to recover the basic structure of the pieces but at the cost of losing all the subtleties that we had added to our scores with great dedication and effort. Fortunately, over time, this changed, and the XML exchange format became common to all programs, although many nuances are still lost along the way. In 2011, coinciding with the rise of open-source software, Musescore emerged as a free and popular option, although it still has its limitations for professional editing. If we add to all this the proliferation of public domain printed music databases, especially IMSLP or CPDL, it doesn't seem far-fetched to think that in a few years there could be a global database of digital music, providing everyone with digital and editable versions of all the public domain musical heritage that is part of our Western culture. In the meantime, if you want to triumph once and for all in the format war, PDFtoMusic Pro is the answer to all your prayers. You're welcome!
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