Co-chair meeting minutes: 19 June, 2025

MNX

Adrian has added the showOctave boolean to the clef object, and updated the description for the glyph value in clef to make clear that if your only reason for specifying the glyph is to specify that the clef should show an octave indicator, you should use showOctave instead. This closes issue #424.

Adrian has also added a supports.usesBeams boolean: if this is set true, it is assumed that every beam is encoded, and that if no beam object is specified, no beam should be shown.

Finally, Adrian has also committed the big changes for the encoding of beams, making the encoding of secondary beams optional (so they are implied if they are not encoded), handling the encoding of partial beams or hooks. Adrian decided to leave the encoding of secondary beams as they are in existing examples, and create a new example that shows the two approaches for secondary beams. After further consideration of the recent comments on issue #419, Adrian decided to retain the list of explicit events in the beam, on the basis that it assumes too much implicit knowledge, e.g. that grace note events should be excluded. Adrian will make some further revisions to the new example for secondary beams to make it clearer, and then plans to close issue #419.

Next, Adrian will add support for beams to the MNX converter (which currently has no support for beams at all).

The three co-chairs will be meeting in person to spend the day working on MNX in London in two weeks, so between now and then Adrian will finalise the list of items to be discussed in the workshop. We are hoping to make some significant progress on a few items when we are able to work together in person for a whole day.

Myke outlined a brief proposal for vendor-specific extensions to MNX. He proposes that we should allow a key called _x for arbitrary structured data and a string called _c for comments in every MNX object. Applications will be free to ignore, consume, preserve or discard this data as they wish. Myke will raise an issue with some further details for feedback.

Next meeting

The next co-chairs’ meeting will be an all-day workshop on Friday 4 July 2025 in London.