Writing Music on a Phone or Tablet

Draw notes, move them, change their length — all with your fingers

Who this page is for

The test is whether you are using your fingers, not how small the screen is. A tablet held sideways is wide, and it still works this way; a phone held upright works this way too. Conversely, squashing a desktop window flat does fold the layout up, but you still have a mouse in your hand, so this page is not for you — that one is narrow screens and phones.

A phone can do just as much as a desktop: draw notes, move them, change lengths, change instruments, insert and delete bars, triplets, export, share — it is all there. A long score does go faster on a desktop, but for a short piece, fixing a few notes, or adjusting something that occurred to you while you were out, a phone is entirely enough.

One finger: tap, drag, press and hold

A single finger has three ways down, and what they mean depends on where you put it and on which mode the toolbar is in (Select only, or holding a note length — see the roll toolbar):

Three things worth knowing up front:

• Touching does not select immediately. Your finger is both the cursor and the click, so the editor waits a moment: move more than a hair and it takes that as panning, hold still for about 0.4 seconds and it takes that as a press and hold, and if neither happens it counts as a tap when you lift off. That way you never change the selection by accident just because you wanted to scroll.
• While dragging a note, push it to the edge of the screen and the roll scrolls itself. You do not have to let go first to move something a long way.
• Inserting and deleting bars needs a press and hold on empty space in Select only mode. While you are holding a note length, press and hold is taken by the dashed box for drawing, so no menu appears — switch back to Select only and it is there. What is in that menu is in right-click menus (empty space).

Two fingers: panning and zooming

Once two fingers are down, whichever you do first wins:

The two axes are judged separately, so spreading horizontally with your fingers sitting at an angle is recognised perfectly well — it watches what you are actually doing, not how you happen to be holding your hand.

Once something is selected: the control panel

Select a note (or a group) and a panel rises from the very bottom of the screen. It is where you adjust notes on a phone, and it is the only way in to the note menu and to Delete.

The position stick: moving a note

The round pad on the left: push it in a direction and the note goes that way — left and right for position, up and down for pitch, exactly as if you had dragged it with your finger. One touch covers both axes; you do not have to fix the pitch first and the position second.

While you push, a crosshair appears on the roll showing where you have pushed to. Push past the edge of the view and the roll follows on its own, so there is no need to let go and scroll.

With several notes selected, the position stick moves the whole group at once, keeping their relationships intact.

The harder you push the faster it goes, and not in proportion: a light push is very slow and very fine, which is what you want when you are aiming at one particular cell; pushing all the way is still a steady walk rather than a bolt across the score. This is a tool for lining things up, so if you need to move something a long way, pan there with two fingers first.

Nothing is written until you let go. Everything while you push is a preview; the edit happens the moment you release, and Undo takes it back.

The length stick: changing length

The long horizontal one at the bottom right only moves left and right: right to lengthen, left to shorten. It is a little slower than the position stick, because overshooting a length affects the next note along (lengthening one can shorten or swallow what follows), whereas overshooting a position only misplaces the note you are holding.

When something would be covered, the top line of the panel tells you how many notes letting go would cover. Push back and that line disappears.

The four buttons

The bottom row is deliberately set apart from the two above it, and Delete has the far right corner to itself: those two are leaving and destroying while the rows above are adjusting, and a finger should not slip between the two kinds.

Only one stick at a time. Moving a note while also resizing it is not a meaningful action, so while one stick is held the other ignores you.

Typing and screen space

The four display toggles

On a narrow screen the title bar gains four toggles (invisible in an ordinary desktop window):

Lit means currently visible. On a phone vertical space is the scarcest thing there is, and turning an area off gives its space to the rest — these four are what you will reach for most on a small screen.

When the system keyboard comes up

Touch the MML text area and the system keyboard covers half the screen. The editor makes room by itself: the back half of the toolbar, the instrument row and the status bar fold away for the moment, and the roll stays — because while you are typing, the result on the roll is exactly what you want to watch. Dismiss the keyboard and the three come back.

One more thing: tapping a tab does not raise the keyboard. On a small screen, tapping another tab usually means you want to look at that track's notes, not type — so switching tabs, adding a score and renaming one all leave the cursor alone. When you do want to type, tap the text area.

Install it as an app

You can add this site to your home screen. Once installed it opens without an address bar, just like a normal app. And once installed it works offline—with no connection it still opens, still edits, and still plays sound.

Chrome on Android usually offers to install it by itself; if you do not see the prompt, look for "Install app" or "Add to Home screen" in the browser menu. On desktop Chrome and Edge an install button appears at the right-hand end of the address bar.

iPhone and iPad give you no prompt, so you do it yourself: the share button in Safari's bottom bar, then scroll down to "Add to Home Screen".

Sound while offline needs the sound bank kept on the device. That file is 30 MB, but there is nothing for you to do: normally it stays behind by itself the second time you open the site, and installing checks again and fetches it if it is missing. To see where it stands right now, open the Settings drawer and look at Offline sound bank—it tells you plainly whether it is ready.

Photograph a score and convert it

When you have music on paper, a phone is the handiest way in — the camera is already in your hand. Choose a PDF or images… under File turns sheet music into a score; how to use it is written up in MIDI and sheet music to MML. Four things differ from a desktop:

• A photograph is noticeably worse than a scan. This is the biggest gap the feature has on a phone. If you have a PDF, send the PDF; if you have a scanner, use the scanner. If a photograph really is the only option, hold it square, light it evenly, get the whole page in, and keep clear of creases and the shadow at the binding.
• You have to be signed in — and the section above notes that on iPhone and iPad, opened from the home screen, signing in may not find its way back. This is the one route that requires it, so if you do get stuck, sign in through this site in Safari and then return to the app on the home screen.
• It cannot be done offline. You can still choose the images and put them in order, but Start recognition only becomes pressable once you are back online.
• Do not switch away while it runs. That step takes tens of seconds to several minutes, and a phone slips into another app — or lets the screen sleep — far more easily than a desktop does.

Everything else is the same as on a desktop

The rest is all present on a phone and works the same way, just tucked inside the hamburger button at the right of the title bar: Clipboard, File (create / save / import / export / clear — for sheet music recognition see the section above), Share, Settings, About. The local and web save lists and every file action other than the Ctrl+S shortcut work by touch too. The toolbar's Tempo, Velocity, Transpose, Optimise and Merge, the instrument row, the score tabs and the status bar are all as they are on a desktop.

Only half of dotted notes works on a phone. To dot a note you already drew, long-press it and use the row in the menu; but "draw dotted notes next" cannot be set — that switch is the note icon in the toolbar, and the toolbar folds away on narrow screens.

Those are all written up in the editor reference, and the keyboard and mouse tables are in shortcuts. How the layout folds up on a narrow screen is in the reference's narrow screens and phones.