Edition & Digitization
From the s. XVI to this day, there have been various techniques for printing and editing scores, woodcut, lithography, mobile types, engraving, musical typewriters, etc. In order to promote the commercial use of musical compositions, publishers progressively improved the printing techniques to give a higher quality of understanding, cleanliness and aesthetics to the scores, as opposed to handwriting.
Since the late twentieth century, the advances in technology in the use of computers and software made it possible for the edition of scores to be made exclusively through the use of computer scorewriter programs.
Digitizing scores is to convert into computer codes all musical notation signs that are in an original manuscript or previous editions made with traditional printing techniques. The result facilitates understanding and order and beauty in the design, which has the printed score.
Currently the main music notation programs in the market are Finale and Sibelius.
Personally I work with Sibelius or Finale, although in Writing Sheet Music you can send your files in Midi or XML formats, in case you have to make arrangements to an already digital file. For Copying assignments (reeditions or manuscripts), any image format such as the Jpg or the PDF is used to work in the digitalization.
