Co-chair meeting minutes: April 11, 2024
MNX
We’ve started to feel that a good chunk of the “bones” of MNX are becoming reasonably stable — so Adrian has put together an initial version of a live MNX viewer:
https://www.soundslice.com/mnx-viewer/
This tool lets you enter raw MNX code and view a graphical rendering of the music. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever software that renders MNX JSON — an exciting milestone!
At the moment, it’s limited to very basic music, as the primary goal was to establish the underlying web infrastructure for the tool. Adrian plans to continue working on the viewer to add support for more of MNX.
The purpose of the tool is twofold. First, we hope it helps developers get to know MNX by experimenting and interacting with it. Second, it provides an opportunity to “eat our own dogfood” by writing code that parses MNX, to get a practical sense of the developer experience. Adrian has reported it was reasonably easy to build this and identified a few small ways we could improve our documentation to make it smoother.
It’s important to note this viewer is built on the (closed-source) Soundslice technology, for no other reason than pragmatism: it’s what Adrian knows from his day job. It was much faster to do that than to learn another notation rendering library. We’d be delighted if somebody in the community wanted to lead an effort to build an MNX viewer using completely open-source software. Please get in touch if you would be interested in this.
Community member Yuriy Kravets raised a handful of issues which Adrian has been looking at. Issue #327 was closed without taking action. In #328, Yuriy proposed that the denominator for time signatures should be allowed to use units of 16 and 32, so Adrian has tightened up the encoding of time signature denominators to use an enumeration. In #326, Yuriy pointed out that the type attribute for barlines was not required, and Adrian has tightened this up too.
Next meeting
The next co-chairs’ meeting will be in two weeks on Thursday 25 April.