Listen "Music fonts and open standards with Daniel Spreadbury"
Episode Synopsis
Daniel Spreadbury returns to Scoring Notes for the final episode of the year. As one of the co-chairs of the W3C Music Notation Community Group, Daniel is responsible for maintaining and developing the Standard Music Font Layout, or SMuFL, an open-source common set of font specifications which he created. On today’s episode, Daniel talks with David MacDonald and Philip Rothman about the forthcoming updates to that standard, which in less than a decade has been adopted by many diverse and robust music applications. Daniel takes us through a bit of music font history, from the early days of Adobe’s Sonata Font, first-generation implementations in Finale and Sibelius, and the sequence of events that ultimately led to the development of the SMuFL standard and the creation of its reference font, Bravura, for use in Steinberg’s scoring application, Dorico. We also get a look ahead to technical improvements in Dorico that will soon allow it to run on Apple’s newest M1-based computers.
More on Scoring Notes:
Daniel Spreadbury on music fonts: past, present, and future
MakeMusic and Steinberg transfer development of MusicXML and SMuFL to web community group
An interview with Robert Piéchaud about the November font
An interview with Nor Eddine Bahha, musician and font designer
A fount of fonts at Notation Central
Music fonts on Notation Central
More on Scoring Notes:
Daniel Spreadbury on music fonts: past, present, and future
MakeMusic and Steinberg transfer development of MusicXML and SMuFL to web community group
An interview with Robert Piéchaud about the November font
An interview with Nor Eddine Bahha, musician and font designer
A fount of fonts at Notation Central
Music fonts on Notation Central
More episodes of the podcast Scoring Notes
A Scoring Notes holiday shopping trip
22/11/2025
The lowdown on updates
04/10/2025
With freelancing comes responsibility
30/08/2025
You have questions, we have answers
09/08/2025
MOLA 2025 conference and tech fair wrap-up
07/06/2025
ZARZA We are Zarza, the prestigious firm behind major projects in information technology.