Co-chair meeting minutes: April 25, 2023
In-person meeting, Friday 2 June 2023, Berlin
A quick reminder that we are planning an in-person meeting at the MOLA Conference Tech Fair at the Hanns Eisler Musikhochschule in Berlin on Friday 2 June at 3.30pm. We would love to see as many community members as possible attend the meeting. If you are planning to attend (either in-person or online) please complete this form.
MNX
Adrian has continued to work on the JSON version of the specification. The page that compares MNX to MusicXML has been updated to refer to the JSON key names rather than XML element names. The remaining work is to complete the migration of the XML element descriptions to the JSON equivalents.
Myke led a discussion about the use of microformats in MNX, with the general thesis that using microformats for important data types like time signatures, note pitch, note duration, etc. may not ultimately be desirable for MNX. Although these are useful in terms of making the data more compact and human-readable, there are many potential disadvantages to using microformats, including:
- Too distant from the goal of making data encoding in MNX amenable for a native format
- Brittle and hard to expand in future
- They don’t reveal the underlying data type: a time signature represented as a string like “4/4” doesn’t explicitly reveal that a time signature consists of (at least) a numerator and a denominator
The co-chairs agreed in principle that we should avoid the use of microformats in MNX and remove the ones that are currently specified. Adrian pointed out that the move to JSON is what makes this a viable option, since JSON is more compact than XML: creating richer data types in XML would be considerably more verbose overall. Myke has prepared a discussion in GitHub to summarise the co-chairs’ proposal and to gather feedback from the community.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will be on 9 May 2023.
