mei-friend

This article presents mei-friend, a free and open-source editor for music encodings. Whereas traditional music-encoding workflows involve iterative sequences of XML editing, rendering, and visual inspection of the score image, mei-friend is a synoptic editor that provides synchronized, interactive views of both encoding (in MEI XML) and rendered score at the same time. The editor is implemented as a fully browser-based, cross-platform web application, available at https://​mei-friend.​mdw.​ac.​at/. This paper presents the editor’s history, details its design principles, provides an overview of its implementation, and describes the development process and its support for contributions by members of the community. It then presents a case study detailing the first steps of the “last mile” of a typical encoding workflow to directly illustrate some of mei-friend’s capabilities, before discussing its growing uptake within the music encoding community, reporting on its use in pedagogical contexts, and concluding with a discussion of future work.