Frequently Asked Questions

About this site, and about Mabinogi MML

Do I need to install anything

No. Open the page and it works — no download, no plugin, no Java or other runtime. All you need is a reasonably recent browser: recent versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari are all fine.

Do I have to sign in

Editing, playback, MIDI import, file export, and saving named files to local (this browser) all work without signing in.

Three things need a Google account: Save to web, Share, and sheet music recognition (turning a PDF or photographs of a score into a score — see Can I photograph sheet music and turn it into MML). Web saves need an account to identify which files are yours; the reason for Share is set out in the privacy policy: after receiving a copyright infringement notice and removing content, the site is legally required to notify the uploader; and sheet music recognition runs on the server and is expensive to compute, so signing in is the gate on it.

It sounds different from the game

First check which sound bank the site is using. The settings drawer (Settings in the title bar) shows which one is currently loaded.

What this site loads by default is a player-made imitation sound pack — close to the real thing, but not the game's own files, which is what keeps it clear of copyright problems. It does differ from the game's actual instruments, particularly in the release tails and the volume balance of certain instruments.

Three other common causes:

• Velocity is not set. The volume balance between tracks in the game is not necessarily the same as the defaults here.
• The wrong instrument. The instrument dropdown on the tab decides the sound; the @ command inside the MML does not take effect on this site.
• The tempo was overridden by another track. t is shared by the whole piece — see the MML syntax guide.

Can I use my own sound bank

Yes. The settings drawer can load your own .dls, .sf2 or .sf3 file.

Once you do, the dimmed range on the roll follows it. Which pitches an instrument can produce is computed from the sound bank itself rather than a hard-coded table — so the dimmed rows are always exactly where the bank you loaded makes no sound.

Can I lose my score

By default it is saved automatically: after every edit the current working state is stored in your browser, so a refresh or a restart picks it up again. This is one resumable state, not a library of named files; Create New starts a separate blank file.

To keep several pieces, use File → Save to…: local stores them in this browser (20 MB limit, no sign-in), while web stores them on this site's server (sign-in required, available on another computer). Both let you open, delete, copy between destinations, and batch-download a .zip; saving under an existing name asks before overwriting. After the first save, Ctrl+S writes straight back to the same file.

Local is not a permanent backup. Changing browser or computer, clearing site data, or closing a private window loses those files. For long-term safekeeping, export or batch-download them to your own computer.

Autosave can be turned off in the settings drawer. With it off, a refresh returns to the last state that was stored; changes not saved or exported elsewhere are lost.

Changing the language reloads the page, but the score survives (the undo history is cleared, and there is no way around that).

What if I am over the character limit

The limit is counted per track, separately. The numbers are set by the game and are hard limits. A track over its limit turns red, but the editor never stops you carrying on editing.

Four approaches, from gentlest to harshest:

1. Try Lossless first. It changes only the spelling, never the sound — collapsing repeated length commands into l, turning octave jumps into < and >, and so on. Hand-written scores usually save a fair amount.
2. If that is not enough, switch to Non-standard durations. It recomputes at the game's timing resolution — the game truncates lengths that do not divide evenly, so a16.&a64 (8 characters) and a9 (2 characters) are the same length in the game. Not one note changes once pasted into the game; the cost is that this site uses a finer resolution, so reading it back is a few steps off — the piano roll and playback drift. That makes it the last step: compress, then paste, and press Ctrl+Z first if you want to carry on editing. The reasoning is in the reference.
3. Use the three note-length rules inside Optimise in the toolbar. This is the only place in the editor that changes the sound, and what it moves is note length — holding a note so it swallows the rest after it (c4r4 → c2), or shortening it so it creates one (c2 → c4r4). No note's start time moves at all, so the rhythm cannot be broken; what changes is how legato or staccato it feels. Fill the gap saves the most and leaves the least articulation, Partial fill keeps a little of it, and Tail rest gives the tail back as a breathing point. One at a time, and it reports how many characters it saved.
4. Delete things. If none of the above is enough, the only way left is fewer notes — repeated passages, ornaments that are too dense, inner voices nobody can really hear.

A score that came from a MIDI import is especially worth running Lossless on first. The importer writes things out literally — one l for the whole track, no merged rests, no rewritten spellings, so that what you get is easy to edit — which means step 1 usually does save real characters on it, measured at 1–18%.

How many tracks does a score have

The game's Blank Score takes 4 tracks: Melody, Harmony 1, Harmony 2 and Vocal. One tab is one complete score, with the four tracks separated by commas.

A tab's position is its identity, and dragging to reorder moves the content and the instrument along with it.

How do share links work

Sign in, press Share in the title bar, and you get a URL that looks like /mml/xxxxxxxx-…. Give it to a friend and what they open is your score, loaded into the editor, ready to play or carry on editing.

A few things to know:

• There is no daily quota. Only a gate against scripts (10 a minute), which sharing by hand never reaches.
• What is sent is every tab that has content, each track subject to the game's own character limit.
• Shared content is visible only to whoever has the URL, and is not indexed by search engines.
• Sharing identical content again returns the same URL rather than creating a pile of duplicate links.
• The settings drawer lists everything you have shared, and lets you delete any of it.
• A share link carries no language — whoever receives it sees it in their own language, not yours.

How do I write chords

One track can only sound one note at a time, so a chord has to be split across tracks: the melody carries the melody, and Harmony 1 and Harmony 2 take one note each.

This site used to support the [ceg]4 form as a convenient way to try out harmony, and it is now retired. It is not the game's syntax and would not play once pasted back, and the price it demanded was that the whole editor had to make way for it — a track using chords could not be edited in the piano roll, transposition worked only by whole octaves, tempo changes could not be split, and it could not be merged into anything else.

When an old score is pasted in, [ and ] are dropped along with the other unrecognised characters, with a single notice; the note letters inside are read one after another as single notes — so [ceg] becomes "do re mi sounding in sequence" rather than a chord. To restore the harmony, paste those notes into Harmony 1 and Harmony 2 separately.

Can I export an mp3

Yes. The Mixdown MP3 export button beside the format dropdown in the File panel produces an ordinary mp3 — send it to someone who does not play the game and has installed nothing, and it just plays.

It is not the same as saving .mid and the other two: those hand over a score, this one hands over sound, so it has to be computed on the spot, usually tens of seconds.

Pressing it first opens a stage: a view from above where each instrument is a small labelled card you drag to where you want it, and the little circle in the middle is the listener — you. Drag one further away and it gets quieter and moves off to that side, so it sounds like a real ensemble sitting spread out rather than everything piled up in the middle. You can listen while you drag, and press Start export once you are happy. Full details are in the reference page.

Does it work on a phone

Yes, and it is the whole editor. Drawing notes, moving them, changing lengths, inserting and deleting bars, triplets, instruments, export, sharing — all of it works on a phone. It just works differently: tap to select a note, press and hold to pick it up and drag it; once something is selected a control panel rises from the bottom of the screen, where sticks nudge position and length and the note menu lives.

The full finger-by-finger guide is in writing music on a phone or tablet. A long score does go faster on a desktop, but for a short piece, fixing a few notes, or adjusting something while you are out, a phone is entirely enough.

Can I photograph sheet music and turn it into MML

Yes. Under File in the title bar, below the .mid picker, there is a Choose a PDF or images… button. It takes PDF, PNG and JPEG, up to 12 images or one PDF of 40 pages or fewer. If you have a PDF, send the PDF — the whole thing is recognised in one go and the tempo and time signatures follow the piece as a whole. If all you have is paper, a scan (300 DPI or better) is clearly better than a photograph taken with a phone.

This route needs you to be signed in, and it is the only import on the site that does — recognition runs on the server and is expensive to compute.

But it is not one press away from a usable score. Accuracy reaches about ninety per cent at best; the rest is yours to correct, and tempo markings are often not read (when none is found the default tempo is used, so put the printed one back yourself). A misread note looks exactly like one you drew yourself, with no red and no warning — so once it is in, always read it against the original. Think of it as something that types most of the notes in for you; the time it saves is still considerable.

When recognition finishes it opens the same voice list as MIDI, and everything after that is identical. The full account is in MIDI and sheet music to MML.

Do triplets survive the import

They do. Importing snaps every note to a 1/32-note grid and a triplet does not land on that grid — so the importer finds the triplets first, places those three notes on the exact thirds, and only then snaps everything else to the grid. All five bases are recognised: whole, half, quarter, eighth and 16th notes.

Hand-written MML has no restriction either — write c12 d12 e12 and you have a triplet that plays perfectly. The piano roll can do it too: draw a quarter note (or select the notes that were already there) and right click → Make triplets, which cuts each note into three equal parts. The details are in the right-click menus section of the reference page. Those five bases are exactly what the importer looks for, so an imported triplet is identical to one you cut yourself.

Does it cost anything

No. This site is run by one person: non-commercial, no advertising, nothing for sale, and no third-party tracking. For the details see the privacy policy and the terms of service.