Co-chair meeting minutes: August 10, 2026

SMuFL

Daniel has (finally) been working on improving the tooling for working on the SMuFL specification to remove the reliance on the internal Django-based tool, so that it is easy for contributors to work on changes to the specification themselves.

The SMuFL specification itself and the SMuFL metadata files are now automatically generated and published using a GitHub workflow, built from a set of YAML files that encode the glyph ranges, including recommended and optional glyphs and their relationships.

As part of this work, the sources for Bravura, the SMuFL reference font, have also now been added to the SMuFL repository in UFO (Unified Font Object) format, and the automated pipeline also generates both OTF and WOFF versions of the font, and its JSON metadata file, as part of the publication workflow.

This means it is now possible to add a new range of glyphs, or a new glyph to an existing range, by editing the YAML files, and run an automated pipeline to update the spec, metadata files, and the Bravura UFO source, where appropriate empty glyphs will be added. Of course, it is still necessary for a maintainer to design and implement the new glyphs in the Bravura font, but this process ensures that the specification, metadata, Bravura font, and Bravura font metadata move in lockstep.

Daniel has also made two new Bravura releases using this new pipeline, the second of which implementing a lot of feedback that has been piling up over the last few years.

Contributors are very welcome (indeed encouraged) to tackle any of the issues currently assigned to the SMuFL 1.5 milestone in the issue list. A full guide for contributors can be found here, and feedback on this document is likewise welcome.

MusicXML

Karim hasn’t had a chance to send his regular progress update to the mailing list at the time of the meeting, but will do so in the next day or so.

The current focus is working on the roadmap, focusing on a single issue at a time, ensuring that the complete checklist of steps required to successfully make a specification change is being followed, and Karim is refining that checklist as he goes. One refinement, for example, is to ensure that notationref is updated for each change.

Other issues that are planned for the release are also still under discussion with the community as work continues towards getting those issues ready for implementation on the roadmap.

Karim’s plan for the MusicXML test suite is to sync them with the LilyPond MusicXML test suite from which they are drawn, since the LilyPond suite is being updated more quickly than ours.

New formats.music domain

We have registered a new domain formats.music that we intend to be the canonical homes of the formats developed by the CG, and if there is interest from the developers and maintainers of other music formats, we would be very happy to provide subdomain-level redirects for those formats. For now, you can use mnx.formats.music, and smufl.formats.music to reach the GitHub pages sites for these two of the CG’s formats. MusicXML will follow as soon as possible.

Next meeting

The next co-chairs’ meeting is scheduled for Monday 24 August 2026.