Editor Quick Start
Try making a score you can paste into the game
What you already have
Four starting points, four different routes. Find yours first:
| What you have | Which route |
|---|---|
| Nothing at all — you want to write a piece from scratch | This page. Start at section 1 and read down |
| A block of MML someone gave you | Clipboard in the title bar → Paste from clipboard. Details in the clipboard section |
A MIDI file (.mid) | File in the title bar → Choose a file. Details in MIDI and sheet music to MML |
| A stack of photographs of sheet music, or a PDF | File in the title bar → Choose a PDF or images…. This route needs you to be signed in. Details in Sheet music as images or PDF |
This page only covers the first route. At the end you will have a seven-note tune that really does paste into the game's Blank Score — but the tune is not the point. The point is that you will know what every place you passed through on the way is for.
Not sure what MML even is? You can read the Mabinogi MML syntax guide first, but you do not have to — this page never asks you to type a single letter of it.
The five areas
From top to bottom the editor has five areas, with a draggable splitter across the middle:
| This area | What it does |
|---|---|
| Title bar | Five entrances: Clipboard (moving scores to and from the game), File (create, save, import and export), Share (create a link), Settings (interface language, autosave and display preferences — item by item), and About (guides and the demo score) |
| Toolbar | Playback on the left half, editing on the right: the note-drawing tools, zoom, undo and redo, and the five functions Tempo / Velocity / Transpose / Optimise / Merge |
| Piano roll | Where you draw notes with the mouse. The keys down the left side make a sound when clicked; the thin strip along the top is the bar ruler |
| Score area | Tabs along the top, MML text below. One tab is one complete score, handed to one person |
| Status bar | The bottom line: how many scores, how many notes, tempo, total length, when it was last saved, engine state |
Get these two words straight first — everything below depends on them.
A score (a tab) is one sheet handed to one player. It has its own instrument and its own name. Up to 16 of them (the game allows ensembles of up to 16).
A track is one of the four lanes inside a score: Melody / Harmony 1 / Harmony 2 / Vocal — the four comma-separated segments of the game's Blank Score. The character limit is counted per track, separately.
1. Listen first
What you get on opening the site is not a blank page but a finished piece (ten scores, ten instruments). Touch nothing yet — just press ▶ Play at the left of the toolbar.
Three things happen at once, and each is worth a glance:
- A line sweeps left to right across the piano roll — that is the playhead, and whatever it is passing over is what you are hearing
- The view turns the page by itself. That is Follow doing its job; if you scroll horizontally by hand during playback it switches itself off (you evidently want to look somewhere else), and one click turns it back on
- The MML in the text pane lights up as it goes — whatever is lit is the letter currently sounding
The button becomes ❚❚ Pause, and pressing it again gives ▶ Resume; Stop returns to the beginning. Your hands need not leave the keyboard: Space is play/pause, and while playing ← → move one bar back and forward and ↓ stops (the reference has the whole set, and the shortcuts page has the full table).
To hear just a middle section: left click on the bar ruler to set the start and right click to set the end, and Range in the toolbar lights up. Whole clears those two markers and goes back to the whole piece. Loop next to it restarts from the top the moment playback reaches the end.
Neither pane can be edited during playback. The roll and the text pane are read-only while the piece is playing, and that is deliberate — press Pause or Stop before changing anything. You can edit while paused; the changes take effect when you press Resume.
2. Clear the page
To write your own, the demo piece has to go. It lives at title bar → File → Create New at the top.
It starts a brand-new file: 1 empty score remains, with names, instruments and the file name back at their defaults, the meter back to 4/4 and section marks cleared; the key signature and line-wrap setting are kept. Ctrl+Z undoes it, so press it without worrying.
To get the demo piece back, open About in the title bar and press Load demo score. It replaces the current contents in place and, like Create New, Ctrl+Z undoes it. The wordmark in the top-left now simply returns to the editor home page and does not clear anything.
3. Draw seven notes
We are going to draw the first seven notes of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star: Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol. Not because it is easy, but because you can hear when it is wrong — nobody notices a wrong note in a scale, but a wrong note in Twinkle Twinkle is obvious the moment it sounds.
Reading this on a phone or tablet? What follows is written for a mouse and keyboard. The finger equivalents — tap to draw a note, press and hold to pick one up and drag it, and the panel at the bottom of the screen for changing length and deleting — are in writing music on a phone or tablet. Read the two side by side; everything else in this section applies either way.
Look at the middle of the toolbar. Select only is arrow mode (it draws nothing), and the six buttons 1 to 32 to its right are the note length: whole, half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second. The note icon on the left shows what you are about to draw, and clicking it adds a dot (half again as long) — there is a sixty-fourth note with no button of its own too, see the reference.
Press 3 for a quarter note (or just click the 4 button). Then left click seven times on the roll, in this order:
Do Do Sol Sol La La Sol
Find the pitch using the keys down the left — clicking a key sounds that note, so listen for the right one before clicking the cell to its right. Middle Do is on the o4 row.
Four things you can do while drawing; the hint on the right of the toolbar says the same:
| Action | Result |
|---|---|
| Left click on empty space | Places a note of the length you selected |
| Drag a note | Moves it (up and down for pitch, left and right for position) |
| Drag a note's right edge | Changes its length |
| Right click a note | Opens a menu whose last item is Delete notes (the note becomes a rest of the same length, so nothing after it shifts) |
To stretch that last Sol into a half note, drag its right edge one cell further. Press Esc before letting go if you change your mind.
Press ▶ Play when you are done (or Space). If it sounds like Twinkle Twinkle, it is right. Right-click any wrong note, choose Delete notes and draw it again, or press Ctrl+Z.
Delete also deletes: select the note first, then press Delete. But it only means that while focus is outside the text pane — inside the text pane, Delete deletes characters. The shortcuts page covers this properly.
4. Look at the text pane
Look down at the text pane. The seven notes you just drew are already a line of MML, roughly like this:
l4ccggaag2
The actual numbers depend on which row you drew on (there will be an octave mark such as o4 as well), but the shape is the same.
The roll and the text pane are two views of the same data, not two files. That has three consequences you can use straight away:
- Edit the MML by typing in the text pane and the roll changes immediately
- Select a span of text in the text pane and the matching notes are selected in the roll — and the other way round
- Double-click a note in the roll (in Select only mode) and the text cursor jumps to that note. This is how you find things in a long score
Editing in the roll regenerates the whole track's MML. Not one note changes, but any comments and manual formatting you wrote will be lost. So the habit is: get the notes right in the roll first, and format by hand last — never the other way round.
5. Add a harmony
The text pane has three boxes side by side: Melody / Harmony 1 / Harmony 2 — the three tracks of one score. (On a narrow window they stack vertically, and on a phone they become three small tabs.)
What you drew is in Melody. Click the Harmony 1 box and the roll's focus moves to that track; then draw a few long notes the same way as an accompaniment — say Do Do Fa Do, each a half note (press 2).
While you draw you will see the melody track's notes still there, but filled a shade darker; the track you are editing is solid. Notes from the other scores stay on screen too, drawn as outlines — three distinct looks, so you can line things up.
Press Play again and the two lines sound together.
One track can only sound one note at a time. Chords have to be split across tracks (one note in Melody, one in Harmony 1, one in Harmony 2); you cannot write [ceg] — the game does not accept that form, and this site has retired it. See the FAQ.
For a vocal score, switch the Instrument score dropdown in the instrument row to Vocal score: there is then a single Vocal track. Switching never discards the other side — switch back and everything is still there.
6. Set the tempo
Do not type the tempo into the text pane by hand — use the Tempo button in the toolbar. It writes t in the right place and deals with notes that cross a tempo change.
- Press Tempo
- For Position choose Start of track (choose "Before the selected note" only if the tempo changes mid-piece, and select a note first)
- Drag the Tempo (BPM) slider. Preview next to it plays a fixed rhythm pattern so you can hear the tempo on its own
- Press Apply
Every score has to carry its own tempo. This is the easiest thing to get caught by in this version: a score is copied to one person, and without a t that person plays at their own default speed.
Worse, it sounds right here — playback always converts against the tempo reference, so there is nothing to hear on this site and it only drifts once you are in the game. When tempos disagree the status bar keeps a warning up with the button that fixes it right beside it, and the tempo dialog has Sync all scores to match every score to the reference in one go.
7. Watch the character count
Each track has a pair of numbers to its right, for example 7 notes · 12/1600 chars. That is the count after export, with spaces and line breaks excluded — so you can use line breaks to separate bars without paying for them.
The four tracks have different limits:
| Track | Limit |
|---|---|
| Melody | 1,600 characters |
| Harmony 1 | 1,200 characters |
| Harmony 2 | 900 characters |
| Vocal | 1,200 characters |
This is a hard limit set by the game: go over it and the score will not paste into a Blank Score. The count turns red when you do, but nothing stops you carrying on editing. The number shown on screen is the limit actually in force — where it disagrees with this table, believe the screen.
If you really are over: the Optimise button in the toolbar, starting with Lossless (which does not touch a single note). If that is not enough, Non-standard durations changes nothing once pasted into the game either (the cost is that the piano roll and playback here drift), and Regroup leaves the notes alone too; only the remaining three change the sound. See the Optimise section of the reference and the FAQ.
8. Paste it into the game
The last step. Title bar → Clipboard → Copy current score on the right.
That copies the current score as a block of MML@…; text with all four segments (Melody / Harmony 1 / Harmony 2 / Vocal) inside it, ready to paste straight into the game's Blank Score. Copying strips whitespace — that is what the game counts.
If a track is over its limit it still copies for you, but it says so: "this one will not paste into the game's Blank Score". Go back and shorten it first.
For an ensemble: one score goes to one person, so you have to switch to each tab and copy it separately. Copy all next to it produces a multi-line block that cannot be pasted into the game as a whole — but each line individually can, and pasting that block back into this site restores the score names and instruments too, which makes it good for backups or for sending to a friend.
Autosave keeps only the working state you resume next time. To keep several named files, use File → Save to…: local needs no sign-in but stays in this browser; web requires a sign-in and opens on another computer. To give someone a link, use Share, which also requires a sign-in.
Where to go next
- Editor reference — what every button does, and how Velocity, Transpose and Merge work
- Keyboard and mouse shortcuts — four tables, one page
- Mabinogi MML syntax guide — if you would rather write the text directly
- MIDI and sheet music to MML — turn an existing MIDI file, or a PDF or photograph of sheet music, into a score without drawing note by note
- FAQ — sound banks, saving, character limits, sharing