The Music Encoding Initiative and its Generation Workflows

This article looks at the different workflows for generating MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) files. MEI is nowadays an essential XML standard in musicology for encoding musical scores. However, the methods used to produce rigorous files are sometimes complex and discourage many musicologists. This paper therefore uses a didactic approach to present the most common processes for converting music files to MEI. The aim is to highlight a range of techniques and tools that can be adapted to the situation and IT skills of each user. In addition, this article encourages the use of programmatic methods by introducing some simple examples for automating MEI conversion procedures with large batches of files.