Notation Interchange File Format (NIFF) is a music notation file format used primarily for transferring music notation between different scorewriters.
A scorewriter, or music notation program is software used with a computer for creating, editing and printing sheet music. A scorewriter is to music notation what a word processor is to text, in that they both allow fast corrections (undo), flexible editing, easy sharing of electronic documents, and clean, uniform layout. In addition, most scorewriters, especially those from the 2000s, are able to record notes played on a MIDI keyboard, and play music back via MIDI or virtual instruments. Playback is especially useful for novice composers or music students or when no musicians are readily available or affordable.
The NIFF project was started in February 1994 to create an open format that would allow exchange of music between various scanning / Music OCR, editing and typesetting programs. The project was sponsored by several music notation software publishers.
The NIFF format itself is based upon RIFF (Resource Interchange File Format), a file structure provided by Microsoft, in which data is divided into Lists, Chunks and Tags. Almost all data in a NIFF file are optional. The level of detail contained can range from just the pitch and timing (akin to MIDI) to a precise page layout, embedded graphics and embedded MIDI information.
Microsoft Corporation (MS) is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. As of 2016, it is the world's largest software maker by revenue, and one of the world's most valuable companies. The word "Microsoft" is a portmanteau of "microcomputer" and "software". Microsoft is ranked No. 30 in the 2018 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
MIDI is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and related audio devices for playing, editing and recording music. A single MIDI link through a MIDI cable can carry up to sixteen channels of information, each of which can be routed to a separate device or instrument. This could be sixteen different digital instruments, for example.
Though detailed and comprehensive, the standard never really caught on except for limited interchange between music OCR software and score writing software. Three of the music OCR programs in widespread use – PhotoScore, SharpEye, and SmartScore – export NIFF files. NIFF is now considered obsolete mainly due to the MusicXML format. As of February 2006 the NIFF project web site has been closed. The NIFF SDK is available at The NIFF SDK Archive for educational usage.
SmartScore X2 is a music OCR and scorewriter program, developed, published and distributed by Musitek Corporation based in Ojai, California.
MusicXML is an XML-based file format for representing Western musical notation. The format is open, fully documented, and can be freely used under the W3C Community Final Specification Agreement.
The Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) is a generic file container format for storing data in tagged chunks. It is primarily used to store multimedia such as sound and video, though it may also be used to store any arbitrary data.
LilyPond is a computer program and file format for music engraving. One of LilyPond's major goals is to produce scores that are engraved with traditional layout rules, reflecting the era when scores were engraved by hand.
Music information retrieval (MIR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. MIR is a small but growing field of research with many real-world applications. Those involved in MIR may have a background in musicology, psychoacoustics, psychology, academic music study, signal processing, informatics, machine learning, optical music recognition, computational intelligence or some combination of these.
The Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) is a file format for professional cross-platform data interchange, designed for the video post-production and authoring environment. It was created by the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), and is now being standardized through the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).
capella is a musical notation program or scorewriter developed by the German company Capella Software AG, running on Microsoft Windows or corresponding emulators in other operating systems, like Wine on Linux and others on Apple Macintosh. Capella requires to be activated after a trial period of 30 days. The publisher writes the name in lower case letters only. The program was initially created by Hartmut Ring, and is now maintained and developed by Bernd Jungmann.
Music Write is a Windows-based music notation program created by Voyetra Music Software. It uses a MIDI-based system for storing events, and the most recent versions save music in MWK files, similar to Standard MIDI Files with additional text and symbol events. Currently, Voyetra offers three editions of Music Write: Starter Kit, Songwriter edition, and Maestro edition. All support printing, MIDI recording, and MIDI playback granted the user has the appropriate hardware.
Optical music recognition (OMR) or Music OCR is the application of optical character recognition to interpret sheet music or printed scores into editable or playable form. Once captured digitally, the music can be saved in commonly used file formats, e.g. MIDI and MusicXML.
Digital sheet music is technology for representing and displaying sheet music in a computer-readable format. With the emergence of several technological innovations, sheet music evolved in several stages into what was to be termed digital sheet music.
Power Tab Editor is a free tablature authoring tool created by Brad Larsen for Windows. It is used to create guitar, bass and ukulele tablature scores, among many others. The current version uses the *.ptb file format.
Mozart the music processor is a proprietary WYSIWYG scorewriter. It enables computers using Microsoft Windows to produce musical notation and listen to them in MIDI. The program was engineered by David Webber.
Notion, previously stylized as NOTION, is a computer software program for music composition and performance created by NOTION Music, and now owned by PreSonus. Notion is available for use on Microsoft Windows, macOS and iOS.
Overture is a music notation (scorewriter) program for Windows and Macintosh platforms, written by Don Williams. Visually, the Overture scoring interface resembles Encore, another notation program originally by the same author. Overture was the first scorewriter to feature full Virtual Studio Technology (VST) hosting; the software supports MIDI and audio playback.
The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is an open-source effort to create a system for representation musical documents in a machine-readable structure. MEI closely mirrors work done by text scholars in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and while the two encoding initiatives are not formally related, they share many common characteristics and development practices. The term "MEI", like "TEI", describes the governing organization and the markup language. The MEI community solicits input and development directions from specialists in various music research communities, including technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists in a common effort to discuss and define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures. The results of these discussions are then formalized into the MEI schema, a core set of rules for recording physical and intellectual characteristics of music notation documents. This schema is expressed in an XML Schema Language, with RelaxNG being the preferred format. The MEI schema is developed using the One-Document-Does-it-all (ODD) format, a literate programming XML format developed by the Text Encoding Initiative.
This is a comparison of music notation programs.
Mus2 is a music application for the notation of microtonal works and, specifically, Turkish maqam music. Unlike most other scorewriters, Mus2 allows the user to work in almost any tuning system with customizable accidentals and play back the score with accurate intonation. The application has also received praise for its clean interface and usability.
Musink is a scorewriting computer program for Windows. It is a WYSIWYM editor, with automated music- and page-layout functionality. Two versions of Musink exist: Musink Lite, which is freeware; and Musink Pro, which is not free but contains additional features.
MagicScore is a music notation and composition software product for PCs running Microsoft Windows. Versions of the product sell under the names Maestro Composer, Maestro Notation, and Maestro Notation for MS Word. Two free products in the same product line are offered under the names Maestro Performer and Maestro Online.
Forte is a music notation program or Scorewriter developed by the German company Lugert Verlag located in Handorf. Its name is derived from the dynamic marking forte. The program is available in German and English.