Co-chair meeting minutes: May 16, 2024

MNX

Following on from our last meeting, Adrian has resolved the existing cases where enumerations had the duplicate value none. The affected enumerations were staffSymbol (where none has been replaced with noSymbol), tupletDisplaySetting (noNumber) and barlineType (noBarline).

Paul Overell identified a small error in one of the example projects (issue #336), which Adrian has also fixed.

Werner Lemberg has raised concerns about the line endings in the Git repository (issue #338). Adrian hasn’t yet looked at this issue, but thinks it should be not too problematic.

Werner also raised an issue about the use of the terminology for accidentals, and in particular the use of the term cautionary, which is considered ambiguous (issue #331). In accidentalDisplay, we will remove cautionary and editorial and add a new value enclosure to specify whether and how the accidental is bracketed.

At the moment, MNX specifies that accidentalDisplay must be present if an accidental should be rendered. After some discussion, we have decided that we should relax this restriction, since we are concerned that this might be difficult for every class of applications (since it implies that they should have implemented an algorithm for determining where and whether accidentals should be displayed). We propose adding a supports dictionary to MNX, similar to (but more structured than) the identically named element in MusicXML, to allow the exporting application specify its approach towards encoding accidentals (and, in future, other notations). Adrian will create a pull request for this in due course.

MusicXML

There has been some lively discussion concerning our proposal to move the DTD doctype identifier to a domain that is under the direct control of the CG (discussion #503). We welcome further feedback from the community on this issue. Myke suggested the one possibility would be to try changing the doctype identifier during the development phase of MusicXML 4.1 to uncover any problems, with a commitment to review the decision before the end of the development period.

Adrian also fixed a problem with the Python requirements.txt for the doc generator tool that needed to be pinned to a specific version of Django so that Myke could get it running on his own system in preparation for a MusicXML revision.

Next meeting

The next co-chairs’ meeting is scheduled for Thursday 30 May 2024.