Sibelius Embed (sibembed) updated to support oembed

In a classic reversal, I’ve decided that I shall come up with a CONSUMER for embedding scores in blogs (in my case only wordpress, to proof a concept) before any PROVIDER comes by, with respect to the oEmbed protocol.

(Note: for jargons, see oEmbed website for background)

A quick survey of embed.ly shows no providers providing embeddable scores, i.e. if you’re publishing scores to your e-commerce store or publisher sanctioned website, you will have to manually find the link to the score in the source code and embed it manually (or using sibembed). If you publish yourself, then (for Sibelius) it’s basically a HTML affair day after day of copying code to your website, instead of using a content management system.

Demo

http://www.useful-music.com/score.php?s=1

The above is achieved simply by putting http://www.useful-music.com/score.php?s=1 (which is the page I found my score) on an empty line in wordpress.

WordPress Plugin
If you want to embed scores in your wordpress blogs, you can try my old sibembed plugin that I wrote 4 years ago and have a go with it. I haven’t updated it for a while except to add support for oEmbed.

This plugin allows you to upload the .sib file onto your wordpress like any other media file, and then using just the URL without fussing over the <object> and <embed> tags. It also works if you publish to, say, scoreexchange (previously sibeliusmusic) or other sites, but you will need to do a bit of work to find the .sco file from the source code and use that instead.

Why am I doing this?
Sheet Music itself is changing. Since my uni days I’ve heard of MusicXML, which has since gain wide acceptance. Its neutrality as a standard is questionable after being sold to MakeMusic (ie. Finale), but it still provides a glimmer of hope for a universal score player for the web to be built.

As of now, there’s no such universal player for sheet music like, say, a good YouTube video player who can recognize multiple file formats. This is because the most popular formats are proprietary (.sib in my case), while MusicXML loses the nice typesetting in the proprietary software. Moreover, putting scores online is akin to “publishing” it, where an industry of so called “experts” tries their very best to protect their interests, making sure that no one is given permission to recreate without passing on benefits. In this equilibrium, innovations will have to rely on business development efforts of each and every platform provider, by providing the best player (ie. distributor) while absorbing the headcount cost of development and vetting music legitimacy.

Case in point (at least for the Sibelius platform again – sorry I’m not aware of the Finale ecosystem): After Avid purchased Sibelius, something happened behind the scenes, and sibeliusmusic.com became scoreexchange.com run by ADAP Tech. This is baked into Sibelius as the default publishing endpoint, as they have chosen to stamp out competition by providing an end-to-end create-publish-sell service. Although you can publish your score for free, the entire design of the site is a really boring e-commerce engine, but no one other than Scorch can decode the “compiled” .sco files which can be played back but not edited.

But what makes us think people always create sheet music to SELL!? I mean, I do, but many times I just muse on my blog with random inserts, like Christmas Songs, or New Year Celebrations. The same goes with a photographer who snaps pictures onto Flickr, the videographer who uploads his daily baby or cat video to YouTube, the artist, blogger, singer, poet, etc. etc. etc. They just want to make it easy for people to share what they share with them.

I found some challengers that focuses on the social space such as MuseScore that tries to lower the bar but is still a long way off because most composers/arrangers are on Sibelius/Finale these days. Moreover, many of us care about the visual presentation of the score as much as the best effort MIDI output our modern computers can simulate.

Thus, here’s my simple request – if it has to be scoreexchange or whatever “approved” publishing platform to “uphold copyright” or “monetize sheet music” so be it. With great powers comes great responsibility – please be a good provider to enable us composers / arrangers / engravers / sheet music creators an easy way to post our music into our facebook, twitter, blogs, everywhere. I’ve demonstrated what’s technically and legally possible given the current state of things as an outsider (www.useful-music.com is the demo), and I have no energy and ability to transform my proof-of-concept into a full fledged score repository (by licensing SIE). It will mean a lot to me and the handful of composers/arrangers out there who had wrote to me asking for plugin enhancements, if Sibelius/Avid and other major score publishers could instead take the lead to socialize sheet music beyond their wall gardens.

The simplest of which is oEmbed. Make it easy for me to put just a link like http://www.scoreexchange.com/scores/52865.html into my blog, and it auto embeds, without me having to hunt for http://www.scoreexchange.com/sco/scores/5/6/8/52865.sco to plug into tools like sibembed.

Any composers who post music to your blogs out there say aye?

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2 Responses

  1. Pingback: » Ford teams with Facebook to make “social” car
  2. really interested in using your plug ins but not sure about all the technical stuff. I Just want to be able to connect my facebook to a score even one that does not play. I guess I could just use a pdf but it would be nice to have the option of playback too. The only way seems to be via scorch. I am confused. Do i have to export two files from sibelius , an html sibelius scorch files and the original sibelius .sib file into the html of the wordpress?

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