As the only music encoding format, MEI natively supports not only various types of notation, but also fine-grained cross-references—both within a document and to other digital objects—as well as complex transcription-related and editorial markup. At the same time, there is a great need for suitable tools that are graphically oriented and enable easier and faster operation. In this project, "mei-friend" is extended with features that can assist in the generation and visual inspection of markup and annotations. Our goal is to reduce entry barriers in this area and thereby promote the dissemination of MEI for interactive and dynamic music resources.
mei-friend is an editor for MEI that aims to support and facilitate the 'last mile' of the music encoding process. This currently includes correcting encodings generated through conversion from other formats or using optical music recognition.
The tool is a cross-browser web application, thus requiring no additional software installation. It integrates the web-based code editor CodeMirror and the music engraving tool Verovio into a user-friendly graphical interface that enables interconnected navigation and editing of the MEI encoding, both as XML and through the graphical notation rendered by Verovio.
Above all, mei-friend offers a wealth of additional features to streamline workflows related to MEI, including schema-based code completion, GitHub integration, keyboard shortcuts, an easy-to-use interface to the MEI guidelines, and a directory of publicly licensed MEI encodings.
