MNX Specification Working Group meeting: August 25, 2026
New domain
The MNX specification can now be found at the domain mnx.formats.music. (SMuFL can be found at smufl.formats.music, and MusicXML at musicxml.formats.music.)
Doc generator
The MNX doc generator tool no longer requires a back-end database or a web site in order to update the documentation. Everything is now driven from scripts, making it much easier to update the docs: pull requests will also be much simpler, as the edits will be more transparent.
Number types
Per issue #546, Adrian has now made it possible for MNX to use integers and floats, instead of all numbers being integers.
Staves and staff lines
Per issue #531, Adrian has preprared pull request #548 with a proposal for how to encode staff lines in the part measure. After some discussion, partmeasure.staves will remain an array, where each element is a position.staffConfigs, where each staffconfig has a staff key, like clefs, so it’s possible to identify which staff it applies to.
We moved on to specify the maximum number of staves in a part, leaving apart issues of temporary extra staves like ossias. For example, a piano part might typically have a maximum number of staves of 2. For a piano part that might need two extra staves at some point in a piece, you would specify the maximum number of staves as 4, but hide the extra staves where they’re not needed.
We discussed the potential ambiguity of describing the distance between staff lines in terms of staffPosition, meaning that the gap between the staff lines in a normal 5-line staff is 2. Myke proposed that we describe the numeric type used by staffPosition and the distance between staves as a new type, diatonicUnit, which represents one diatonic step on the staff, or half a staff space; this type, rather than staffPosition, can then be used to specify the distance between staff lines. More discussion here is needed – we may choose to leave this out for the time being.
Next meeting
The next spec working group meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 8 September 2026.