Format: NIFF
Music-Notation.info 2014-10-19
Summary:
NIFF is the first standard code for musical notation. NIFF is based on RIFF.
A minor revision,NIFF 6b, is available as of June, 2002. This revision is provided by Jeff Thompson, author of Niffty.
The NIFF (Notation Interchange File Format) was completed in the fall of 1995. This is a standard digital format for the representation of standard musical notation. The format is very flexible, allowing for simple implementations with minimal graphical information, or much more elaborate descriptions including all aspects of page layout, associated midi data, custom symbols, etc.
Sponsored by Passport Designs, Mark of the Unicorn, Musicware, Opcode Systems, and Cakewalk Music Software, the format was designed as a cooperative effort. The members of the team which developed NIFF are listed below. Please note that some of the affiliations listed have changed since NIFF was written.
- Dave Abrahams, Mark of the Unicorn
- Gary Barber, Musicware
- Raymond Bily, Midisoft Corporation
- Mike Brockman, Musicware
- Mark Burton, Blue Ribbon Software
- Don Byrd, Advanced Music Notation Systems, Musicware
- Cakewalk Music Software
- Nicholas Carter, University of Surrey
- John Cerullo, Hal Leonard Corporation
- Daniel Dorff, Theodore Presser
- John Forbes, Boosey & Hawkes
- Tom Hall, A-R Editions
- William Holab, G. Schirmer
- Wladek Homenda, Musitek
- Tom Johns, Hal Leonard Corporation
- Paul Keister, Passport Designs
- Steve Keller
- Dave Kusek
- Lowell Levinger, Passport Designs
- Bill McCann, Dancing Dots Braille Music Technology
- Severo Ornstein, Woodside, California
- Mike Ost, Passport Designs
- Norman Reid, San Francisco, California
- Robert Schuneman, E. C. Schirmer
- Dave Scoggin, Opcode Systems
- Leland Smith, San Andreas Press
- Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities
- Mark Walsen, Notation Software, Inc.
- Don Williams, Opcode Systems
Administrative Coordinator: Chris Newell, Musitek
Special Advisor: Alan Belkin, University of Montreal
The NIFF SDK is complete. It is a free, public domain, platform independent Software Developer's Kit for software developers implementing NIFF. It is a collection of software libraries and tools to support reading, writing, and navigating NIFF files. Documentation, sample code, and a simple NIFF file is included. The NIFF SDK makes it possible for a software developer to add NIFF reading and writing capabilities to an existing program without writing the housekeeping functions that would otherwise be required. The software is supplied in source code format in the C programming language. The following documents are available for download here: