[MEI-L] MEI 5.0 Released

[Benjamin W. Bohl]

Dear MEI community,

It is with great pleasure that we are able to announce the release of MEI 5.:tada:

This release brings with it the introduction of MEI Basic, a new customization to help drive MEI adoption in mainstream applications. As a smaller subset of MEI, it will help application developers provide support for MEI in their software, while also providing users with a path towards the "full" MEI capabilities should they be needed. With this, we hope to improve application adoption, data sharing between MEI projects, and conversion between MEI and other data formats.

Along with MEI Basic, significant improvements have been made to the guidelines, development infrastructure, and encoding consistency, with only limited compatibility changes to the specifications. This release also brings the availability of an auto-generated PDF version of the guidelines. (see the guidelines and release notes for more details).

To support projects using MEI, we have also updated the Encoding Tools (https://github.com/music-encoding/encoding-tools) and Sample Encodings (https://github.com/music-encoding/sample-encodings) repositories. Notably, an XSLT is available to help projects upgrade their encodings from MEI 4 to MEI 5 (https://github.com/music-encoding/encoding-tools/blob/main/mei40To50/mei40To50.xsl).

We want to thank you, the community, and especially the members of the technical team and ODD meetings, for their continued support and engagement! In total, we had over 40 contributors actively involved in the preparation of this release of MEI. Many of them are early-career researchers, investing significant time and effort into the MEI Framework. Since this work often happens alongside conferences, workshops, and other meetings, there is a danger that their contributions are not recognized properly because of relatively informal, but no less significant, settings. We have included in the Guidelines and in the Release Notes a list of our contributors so that we recognize them by name. Without the joint effort of all those involved, an undertaking like MEI would not be possible.

Cheering,
Stefan & Benni

PS: If you have not yet heard, our community is also working towards MEI 5 Basic support in MuseScore, a popular notation editor! More news on this will follow later this year.