Musikmesse Meeting on 7 April

This year’s face-to-face meeting for the W3C Music Notation Community Group will once again take place at the Musikmesse fair in Frankfurt. These meetings are always a highlight of our year as we usually have 40 to 50 music notation experts participating in the meeting and discussions.

This year’s meeting will be held on Friday, 7 April 2017 from 2:30 pm to 5:30 pm at the Logos/Genius conference room in Hall 9.1. This is the same location as last year’s meeting. As in our past meetings, we plan to have a 2-hour meeting followed by a 1-hour reception sponsored by Steinberg.

Our proposed agenda has two main topics: the status of MusicXML 3.1, and discussion of some possible next steps forward with MNX.

Originally we had hoped that MusicXML 3.1 would be shipping before Musikmesse. We have made good progress, but that goal was overly ambitious. We now hope to be feature-complete with MusicXML 3.1, or very nearly so, by the time of our meeting. We will provide an overview of MusicXML 3.1’s new features and discuss whether or not we are feature-complete and ready to proceed with testing and implementation.

MNX is our project for a next-generation music notation standard that does not need to be bound by 100% compatibility with the existing MusicXML format. Joe Berkovitz has been immersed in fleshing out some design ideas for an MNX Overview that we will discuss at the meeting. We will make a draft of this MNX Overview available for review ahead of time so we can have a more productive discussion of these design ideas.

SMuFL 1.2 is pretty much ready to go, awaiting the finalization of MusicXML 3.1 so we can be sure the two standards are in sync with each other. We will give a brief overview of SMuFL 1.2 status, but do not expect to be discussing it as much as the other two topics.

If you have additional ideas for agenda topics, please let us know either as a reply here or via the group mailing list.

Please sign up on our Google form at https://goo.gl/forms/MBBjVjnm3TzeZIz52 if you plan to attend the meeting. This will help ensure that we have enough room and refreshments for everyone.

You will need a Musikmesse ticket to attend the meeting. These cost 30 euros and are available online at www.musikmesse.com.

We look forward to seeing you in Frankfurt!

Best regards,

Michael Good, Daniel Spreadbury, and Joe Berkovitz
W3C Music Notation Community Group co-chairs