SCORE file import format

[ellipse12]

I noticed that MuseScore currently does not have the ability to import files from Leland Smith's SCORE program (as well as everything else that uses the same format). Would there be any interest in adding this, or if there was interest in the past what were the hangups?

[its-not-nice]

Reading the files themselves is easily enough, but I think the obvious challenges here are:

• each page is a separate file in SCORE (some pages are multiple files), so you'd be feeding in a folderful of files and it will probably need some setup in advance to indicate how they should be interpreted
• instruments are not always indentified through the score at the parameter level
• so much is contextual, for example a group of beamed 8ths isn't really encoded as such, it's just a group of stemmed flagless notes that happen to fall within the span of a single beam with the same stem direction; similarly, all text is just 'text', so you can only really work out what is tempo or expression or technique text (etc) from contextual clues (placement, content, styling etc).

All surmountable problems of course, but they do raise the question of how worthwhile such a project would be. Personally I'd be very happy to see it!

[ellipse12]

@its-not-nice I'm guessing the first two problems can just be solved in the import dialog (though I haven't looked too much into how that dialog works so I may be wrong). The last problem kind of just seems like semantic/ context analysis (which I enjoy doing). If you would like I could start working on this? If you think it's worth it.

[ellipse12]

Actually, now that I look at it, there doesn't actually seem to be any import dialog and instead everything is just through the open file dialog? I find this a little confusing, wouldn't it be better to have a dedicated import action, instead of treating everything as an open-able file. In my opinion "open" kind of implies that you are opening a file to edit instead of converting a file into MuseScores representation. What are your thoughts?