Co-chair Meeting Minutes: August 4, 2020
MusicXML 4.0
Issues #53 (concerning the missing layout element from the print element) and #287 (concerning documentation for measure repeats) are both now complete and the pull requests have been merged.
Next up is issue #249 concerning multi-bar rests, which has a text element describing the number of bars in the rest, but this can currently be empty, which is not very helpful, since there’s then no way to know how many bars the rest represents. The plan is to change this so that the text element cannot be empty, which technically changes the format in a way that is not backwards-compatible, but we do not believe that anybody is relying on that behaviour.
Issue #322 was also raised, concerning the playback of repeats in MusicXML after a dal segno jump; MusicXML does not currently specify whether or not repeat endings should be played back after a dal segno jump. This seems like something that could be addressed in the next MusicXML version, and has been added to the MusicXML 4.0 milestone.
MNX-Common
After two weeks of discussion about issue #191, concerning the long-standing issue of how we should resolve the naming of MNX-Common and MNX-Generic, the co-chairs have decided that MNX-Common should be renamed as MNX, in accordance with the common practice of the community.
No immediate decision about the eventual name of MNX-Generic has been taken at this time; we will review this again when work on that specification is restarted.
As part of the naming discussion, there were a number of discussions concerning the idea of profiles, which were proposed as part of the original MNX-Common design as a means of declaring what kinds of notations can be expressed by a particular document, with a view to allowing applications to support different “levels” of MNX-Common.
However, as work on the specification continues, the co-chairs now feel that as part of the constant drive to keep MNX-Common focused on practicality, intelligibility and ease of use, profiles are contrary to those goals. The co-chairs believe that we can do away with the concept of profiles, provided we always specify precisely what the default behaviour for every kind of encoding should be, and take the hard decisions about precisely what can and cannot be encoded in MNX-Common. Adrian will create an issue for community discussion around this point.
Next meeting
The next meeting will be on Tuesday 18 August.
