Notation Interchange File Format (NIFF) is a

music notation Musical notation is any system used to visually represent music. Systems of notation generally represent the elements of a piece of music that are considered important for its performance in the context of a given musical tradition. The proces ...

file format used primarily for transferring music notation between different

scorewriter A scorewriter, or music notation program is software for creating, editing and printing sheet music. A scorewriter is to music notation what a word processor is to text, in that they typically provide flexible editing and automatic layout, and p ...

s. The NIFF project was started in February 1994 to create an open format that would allow exchange of music between various scanning /

Optical music recognition Optical music recognition (OMR) is a field of research that investigates how to computationally read musical notation in documents. The goal of OMR is to teach the computer to read and interpret sheet music and produce a machine-readable version ...

, editing and typesetting programs. The project was sponsored by several music notation software publishers. The NIFF format itself is based upon

RIFF A riff is a short, repeated motif or figure in the melody or accompaniment of a musical composition. Riffs are most often found in rock music, punk, heavy metal music, Latin, funk, and jazz, although classical music is also sometimes based ...

(Resource Interchange File Format), a file structure provided by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

, 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 Musical Instrument Digital Interface (; MIDI) is an American-Japanese technical standard that describes a communication protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, ...

) to a precise page layout, embedded graphics and embedded MIDI information. Though detailed and comprehensive, the standard never really caught on except for limited interchange between Optical music recognition software and score writing software. Three of the

programs in widespread use – PhotoScore, SharpEye, and

SmartScore SmartScore 64 NE is a music OCR and scorewriter program, developed, published and distributed by Musitek Corporation based in Ojai, California. History SmartScore was originally released in 1991 as MIDISCAN for Windows. The product line was la ...

– export NIFF files. NIFF is now considered obsolete mainly due to the

MusicXML MusicXML is an XML-based file format for representing Western musical notation. The format iopen fully documented, and can be freely used under the W3C Community Final Specification Agreement. History MusicXML was invented by Michael Good and ini ...

format. As of February 2006 the NIFF project web site has been closed. The NIFF SDK is available a
The NIFF SDK Archive
for educational usage.

Notes and references

{{Reflist, 2

External links

Music notation file formats