Editor Reference

What every button does

This page is for looking things up. If this is your first time, walk through the editor quick start first — that one is a single route from nothing to pasting into the game. If you only want to know what a key does, see keyboard and mouse shortcuts.

I want to do X — which section

Title bar

The top line. The site name on the left returns to the editor home page; five feature entrances sit on the right.

Clipboard

This is how scores move to and from the game. MML is plain text, so everything goes through the clipboard. The box has two halves:

Copying strips whitespace — that is what the game counts. A score with a track over its limit still copies, but you are told that this one will not paste into a Blank Score.

Some browsers will not let a page read or write the clipboard directly; when that happens a small box opens asking you to press Ctrl+V or Ctrl+C yourself — nothing is broken.

File

Four blocks, top to bottom:

The import list has two modes: Fresh capture (replace everything) and Append (add after the existing tracks). Each row also gets a capture mode; the details of that are in MIDI and sheet music to MML — sheet music recognition opens the same list, with the same modes and the same budget.

To take a whole ensemble away with you, save as .mmi — one mml-track in it is one score. .mml holds at most 16 tracks, so a full ensemble does not fit and something is left out (you are told when that happens).

Share

Creates a link; whoever opens it gets this whole ensemble. Signing in is required (in a copyright dispute this site must be able to notify the sharer by law, so an email address has to be on record).

Before it is sent the score goes through character-count compression that is non-destructive to the original notes — notes, lengths and tempo are completely unchanged, only written more compactly. Sharing identical content again gives you the same link.

The lower half of the box is the list of links you have shared, 10 per page, each with three actions:

Settings

A drawer on the right; for its contents see the settings drawer section. Esc closes it.

About

A drawer on the right containing six guides, the demo score, credits, terms, privacy policy and version information. Load demo score replaces the current contents, but Ctrl+Z undoes it. Esc closes it.

Playback row

The left half of the toolbar.

How to set the range for partial playback: the quickest way is the bar ruler — left click sets the start, right click opens a menu whose first three items are start, end and clear, and you can move the range live on the ruler during playback. In the roll, Select only mode plus a left click on empty space sets the start marker; a right click on empty space now opens a menu, whose first two items are exactly these two markers (see right-click menus). Selected notes can be bracketed directly too — right-click those notes and it is there.

Playback shortcuts

Five keys, and none of them wants a modifier:

The four arrow keys act only while playing or paused; when stopped they do not belong to playback, and neither do they during a drag — the arrow keys are half-cell fine-tuning then. Moving the playhead is clamped inside the playback range and stops at the edge, and never stops playback. With Follow switched off the view jumps to the playhead once, but Follow is not switched back on.

Holding a key does not repeat: one press, one step. To jump further, click straight onto the bar ruler.

Media keys on keyboards and headsets

The media keys along the top of a keyboard, and headset controls, drive playback here too:

Roll toolbar

Select only, and note length

Select only (shortcut 0) is arrow mode: clicking empty space draws no note and sets the playback range instead. The six buttons to its right are the note length, shortcuts 1 to 6:

Choosing a length puts you in drawing mode, and a left click on empty space draws a note of that length. To go back to clicking notes and reading along in the MML after drawing a few, press 0.

There is a seventh, 7, the sixty-fourth note — but no button for it in the toolbar. Press it and all seven go dark; that is not a fault, it means "the current length is not one of these seven". Two costs to know first: one is only 6px wide, so it is only comfortable once you zoom in (zoom far enough and an extra, finer grid line appears to aim at), and it cannot be dotted.

That note icon: what you are about to draw, and dots

The note icon to the left of the six length buttons is not decoration. It answers "what happens if I press on empty space":

Thirteen shapes, all in a row:

l1 l1. l2 l2. l4 l4. l8 l8. l16 l16. l32 l32. l64

Dotted notes

A dot makes the note one and a half times as long: a dotted quarter is l4., the length of three eighth notes. Click that icon, or press ..

. toggles whether the notes you draw next carry a dot — it is the same kind of key as 1–6. The icon follows, and so does the dashed preview box on empty space, which becomes half again as wide. It works at any time, including right after drawing a note (when that note is selected).

So the usual rhythm goes like this:

4        pick the eighth note
draw x2  two eighths
.        dot on
draw     one dotted eighth
.        dot off
draw x2  eighths again

To dot notes you have already drawn, take the other route: long-press (or right-click) the note and use the row in the menu. That route is the better one anyway, because the menu works out whether it is allowed first — if it is not, the grey text says so before you press.

When several are selected and they are not all the same: if any one of them has no dot, they all get one; only once they all have dots does another press take them all off. You never have to work out what the current mixture is — two presses at most gets you where you want.

Two things will stop it, for different reasons:

• The length does not take a dot. Only the six from whole down to thirty-second (and their dotted versions) can. Notes cut into triplets and notes fine-tuned with the arrow keys cannot, and neither can sixty-fourth notes (the result would be a length the interface cannot reach). One bad note stops the whole batch, and the message names the bar and the note.
• It would cover the note after it. Growing by half takes room on the right; if what follows is a rest it simply eats it (that is the common case and not destructive), but if what follows is another note, that note would disappear entirely — so this is refused. If you really want that, drag the note's right edge with the mouse instead: that route tells you how many notes it would delete, so you can see the price before you decide.

Removing a dot is always safe (a shorter note just leaves a rest behind), so that second guard only applies to adding.

The icon is not there on a phone (the toolbar folds away on narrow screens), so there is no way to set "draw dotted notes next" by finger. To dot a note you already drew, long-press it — the menu has a row for it.

Zoom

Two pairs of plus and minus buttons, one per axis: column width (how wide one cell is across) and row height (how tall one pitch row is). The wheel works too:

Zoom is current state only and goes back to the default on refresh.

Undo and redo

Ctrl+Z undoes, Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y redoes. A continuous run of typing counts as one step, not one step per letter.

All five functions below can be taken back with Ctrl+Z, and so can importing, pasting, loading a share, Create New and Clear all notes — so there is no need to be afraid of any of them.

Tempo

Writes t into the score. You can type it by hand, but only this box deals with notes held across a tempo change (they are split in two and rejoined with a tie; it sounds identical, but it is what stops the game drifting out of tune).

• Tempo reference: whose tempo counts as the master. Sync all scores next to it writes that tempo map into every other score
• Position: Start of track (the tempo of the whole piece) or Before the selected note (a change part-way; select a note first)
• Tempo (BPM): a number or the slider. Preview plays a fixed rhythm pattern so you can hear the tempo on its own, and it sounds while you drag the slider too
• Where a tempo mark already exists at that position, an extra Remove this tempo mark button appears

Velocity

Adjusts volume in bulk (MML's v, 0 to 15). Range has four levels: All scores / Current score / Current track / Selected notes; Adjust chooses how many steps louder or softer. The box first tells you how many notes are in that range and what velocities they span.

There is a quicker pair on the roll itself: with notes selected, press + or - for one step at a time. How far those two keys reach depends on how many notes you selected:

0 and 15 are the ends of the scale, and notes pushed past them are clamped, losing the dynamic differences between them — both the box and the hint say so first.

Transpose

Raises or lowers by semitones in bulk. Range again has four levels (All scores / Current score / Current track / Selected notes), and Adjust reads "Up / Down N keys", with an exact octave marked as such.

If it would push notes outside o0–o7 it does nothing at all, and tells you how many notes fall past the top or the bottom — MML simply cannot write pitches beyond that span, so clamping or dropping them would be the kind of damage you only notice later.

Moving notes outside the instrument’s range does go ahead, and afterwards you are told which scores are affected and how many notes each. Those notes are writable, visible and red — just drag them back. Blocking a whole song’s transpose for them would be out of all proportion. See Instrument range.

Optimise

Brings the character count down. This is the only thing that can change the sound, so the six methods come in three groups:

Why Non-standard durations can save more: the game's timing resolution is 384 steps to a whole note, and lengths that do not divide evenly are truncated — l9 is 384 / 9 = 42.6, so 42 steps. a16.&a64 happens to be 42 steps as well, so 8 characters become the 2 of a9 and the game sounds identical. This site uses a finer resolution (1920 steps to a whole note), so those spellings read back a few steps off — which is why the piano roll and playback here drift while the game does not. Keep it for last: compress, then paste; undo first if you want to carry on editing.

What Fill the gap, Partial fill and Tail rest do is bounded: no note's start time changes and the rhythm does not change, only lengths — extended by at most three times their original length and never beyond three whole notes, with the rest they give back no longer than an eighth note. So what you hear is the phrasing getting more or less legato, not the melody changing.

Every option button works out the cost for you first (characters saved, notes affected), and only runs once chosen. Range has the same four levels as before, with three exceptions worth remembering: Lossless always recomputes the whole track and ignores the selection; Non-standard durations does the same and is unavailable when the range is a selection; and Regroup only applies to the current score.

Merge tracks

Folds this track (or the selected notes) into another one. The target dropdown is grouped by score, so you can merge into a different score as well.

Five methods, again chosen by symptom:

The last three either generate a fresh monophonic line or discard the target's content, and both the explanation in the box and the cost on the button (notes dropped, notes shortened) are worked out for you first. Range has two settings: current track, or selected notes.

Piano roll

Where you draw notes with the mouse. The keys are down the left side and clicking a key sounds that note (while playing too); the thin strip along the top is the bar ruler.

Mouse

Press Esc before letting go to cancel a drag; with no drag in progress, Esc clears the selection. During a drag the arrow keys fine-tune by half a cell (only left and right do anything while resizing), and holding Shift moves an octave or a bar at a time. Whether a drag will crush other notes is written out on the right of the toolbar first: "will delete N notes / will shorten N notes".

Marquee selection

In Select only mode, drag a box from empty space and whatever it catches becomes the new selection — dashed outline, pale cyan fill, drawn over the notes (it is saying "I am circling this"), and the fill is faint enough that you can still see what you caught. Touching counts, it does not have to enclose; it does not snap to the grid; and it only selects the track you are on. Drag to the edge of the view and it scrolls by itself.

A plain marquee replaces: the selection becomes exactly what the box caught, and catching nothing clears it. Ctrl+marquee is what adds. Adding is not the default because a selection can be off-screen with nothing on screen to say so — otherwise "select a few notes in bar 3, scroll to bar 40, box the ones in front of you, then edit" would quietly edit bar 3 as well.

One asymmetry while you are here: Ctrl+clicking a note is a toggle (an already-selected note comes out), while Ctrl+marquee is add only (already-selected notes always stay). A box cannot reliably catch "only the ones not yet selected", so it does not try to toggle.

There is no marquee in drawing mode (dragging draws a note there), none during playback, and none by finger — a single finger drag pans the view, and multiple selection goes through the Multi key on the panel (see writing music on a phone or tablet).

Reading the picture

• Solid notes are the track you are editing; the other two tracks of the same score are filled a shade darker with no outline; other scores are outlined with no fill. The middle two are deliberately complementary, so they stay apart on the same screen. Colour is by score
• Selected notes get a white outline around them. The selection is linked to the text pane — select a span of text there and it is selected here too
• With Key signature turned on in the settings, the cell shading switches to talking about the key: in-key rows go darker (they read as empty — put your notes here) while out-of-key rows go one shade lighter (they read as occupied). It is only a hint and blocks nothing
• A dimmed key on the keyboard at the left is a pitch this instrument cannot produce, and those rows cannot be drawn on. See Instrument range
• Bar lines follow the score's real time signatures; the opening meter appears at the top left and meter changes are labelled
• Section marks are the coloured pills along the bottom of the roll. Click to jump; right-click or touch and hold to edit or remove. Matching dots on the native horizontal scrollbar also jump to the mark
• During playback, whatever the playhead passes over lights up

Selecting, deleting, clipboard

Instrument range

Every instrument can only produce a certain span of pitches, and notes outside it are silent in the game — the roll shows a perfectly reasonable note, and pressing play gives you nothing. So the roll draws that fact.

• On the keyboard at the left, the keys this instrument cannot produce are dimmed a shade, and a thin line marks each end of the range
• Those rows cannot be drawn on: move the pointer over them and not even the dashed outline appears
• Dragging up or down stops at the edge of the range. Notes already outside it are never pushed back in — they can stay where they are, or move inwards
• Notes typed or pasted outside the range are painted red on the roll, and the right of the toolbar counts them for the whole score — red paints only the track you are editing, the number covers all three
• That red line can be clicked: it opens a list of which score, which track and which bar across the whole piece, and every row jumps straight there

The range is computed from the sound bank you currently have loaded, not from a hard-coded table. Load a different sound bank and the dimmed rows follow it — what you see is always the one you are hearing.

Strings and voices are particularly narrow, some of them barely three octaves, so switching to one dims most of the roll — that is not a fault. The exact ends are the two lines on the keyboard; there is nothing to memorise.

Transposing is not blocked. If it pushes notes outside the range you are told which scores and how many notes each — those notes are red, so drag them back. Changing the instrument also reports how many notes in that score fall outside.

The percussion roll

On a score whose instrument is Drum set, the roll switches to a layout built for drums. You can turn it off in the settings; it is on by default.

Each of the 15 drum pads gets a row of its own, all of them gathered into the lowest two octaves; the strip down the left carries drum names instead of piano keys; and a note is no longer a long block but a shape at the moment of the hit plus a thin line for its length — drums and toms are circles, hi-hats are downward triangles, cymbals are diamonds and triangles, and the bass drum and side stick are squares.

Not a single character of the MML changes. All that changes is which row a note is drawn on. Turn the setting off and the same score's notes go back to their real pitches, with identical contents.

Dragging a note up or down swaps it to another drum rather than changing its pitch — the empty rows in between are skipped automatically. Transposing is switched off for these scores: adding or subtracting semitones would turn the bass drum into a pitch the game has no key for, which makes no sound at all.

Rows with no drum on them cannot be drawn on, and that covers both the empty rows and every other octave. Mabinogi's Drum set has exactly those 15 sounds, and the extra rows have nothing to play — and now you can see it at a glance: the 15 pad rows are the darkest cells (empty, put your notes here), every other row is a shade lighter (occupied), and the keys of the octaves above are dimmed along with them.

Move the mouse onto the keyboard at the left and the whole column of drum names turns into note names (BD becomes o2F); move away and they turn back. The percussion roll packs the 15 pads into the lowest two octaves, so the row on screen has nothing to do with the pitch that actually goes into the MML — when you are hand-writing MML, this is where you read which note that hit is.

Turning the setting off and going back to the piano roll does not take the drum names away: those 15 pitches still carry their drum names, only placed on the pitches they really are. Real pitch and drum name at the same time, no need to choose.

Red notes

When an imported score contains a duration this site cannot write out, those notes are painted red on the roll and the reason is spelled out at the right of the toolbar. The track stays editable — you can draw, drag, and delete the offending note right there; once it is dealt with the red clears itself.

There are three kinds of red. The duration cannot be written (editing moves it to the nearest legal length), outside the instrument’s range (see Instrument range — that note will not sound in the game), and a non-standard duration is in use (kept exactly as it is, not a tick moved, but the game may not accept it). The next step for the first two is the same one — open the list and work through it — so their message is a single "N notes to deal with", and which kind each one is is written on its row in the list.

Non-standard durations get a line of their own, and it holds the other one back: the toolbar says "This score has N non-standard durations" with a Restore standard durations button beside it. Pressing it converts the non-standard durations across this score's three tracks into standard spellings (one step; Ctrl+Z if you are not happy), the line disappears and the other one takes over. One thing at a time — restoring rewrites durations, so the other two counts would be a different set afterwards anyway.

The button only appears when pressing it would actually do something. Some non-standard durations cannot be restored (tuplets), and there you get the red text with no button — because that is not a defect, the original piece simply was not in standard durations.

Quintuplets and septuplets do not count: cutting a beat into 5 or 7 does not divide evenly into the game's 384 steps, so the remainder has to be spread across the notes. That is a fact about the music, not a mistake, so those notes are not marked red. The test is "they add up to exactly a whole, half or quarter note" — anything outside that (a quintuplet over an eighth, say) still counts.

Rests have no block on the roll, so the two duration kinds can only be marked by the bar shading — something is in that stretch, and the message gives the count. The range kind gets no bar shading: pick the wrong instrument and most of the notes qualify, and shading the whole song red would only make it harder to read.

Right-click menus

A right click on the roll opens one of two menus, and where you click decides which: on a note the menu is about "these notes", on empty space it is about "the timeline at this position". Both are independent of the mode — they open whether you are holding Select only or a note length.

A right click on the bar ruler used to set the end marker straight away; it now opens a menu: set playback start / set playback end / clear playback range / change this bar's meter / add a volume change here. Setting the end marker therefore takes two actions instead of one — that is a step backwards, traded for four things the ruler had no entry point for at all, two of which were simply impossible on a phone (no right click there, and no long press either). By finger, press and hold.

On a note

The heading tells you the bar and how many notes are selected.

Set velocity and the roll's +/- are two different things: this one means "set it to 10", those two mean "one step up or down from where it is".

On empty space

The heading tells you which bar you right-clicked. The first few items are the same kind of thing as in the note menu (playback markers, selecting, pasting); the last six are the only edits on this site that shift the timeline:

The number of bars is set with ◀ ▶ (1 to 16 for inserting; deleting narrows to "how many bars are left from here to the end"), and it resets to 1 every time the menu opens, each of the six rows on its own. Moving multiple tracks still counts as one undo step, so a single Ctrl+Z puts all of it back.

The keyboard inside the menu

Changing a number does not close the menu (otherwise several bars could never be set); only pressing the runnable half closes it. The menu does not take the wheel — swallowing it would feel like the scrollbar had jammed — but scrolling the roll closes the menu (so does resizing the window).

Clicking outside also closes it, and that click does not count — closing the menu by clicking the roll in drawing mode does not draw a note on the way.

Score tabs and the editing area

The lower half of the screen. One tab is one complete score handed to one person, with its own instrument and name; up to 16 of them and at least 1 (a solo is a perfectly normal use).

The tab row

The instrument row

The line under the tabs, left to right:

Mute and Play only are about sound, Show and Show only are about the display: four buttons side by side, entirely independent of each other.

The 3D mix while editing

The concentric circles at the end of the instrument row. The icon is a picture of what it opens: a plan view of a room with you in the middle, one ring every 2 metres.

The button is the switch as well. Click it while dark and it turns the spatial sound on and opens the box; click it while lit and it turns it off. So "lit" always means you really are hearing it. To go back in and move something, click twice — off, then on again. The S key is the same switch but does not open the box — use it to flip the mix on and off and hear the difference.

Every score in the box can be dragged — spatial sound is about relative positions, and you cannot arrange anything if only one piece moves. The dimmed ones are the scores the slider and the reset button do not reach, not scores you cannot touch. The listener in the middle stays put: it is the origin that "straight ahead" is measured from.

Everything starts stacked straight ahead of you, half-overlapping in a single line — all of it inside the innermost ring (the thicker one), and distance does not count inside that ring. So by default every score is exactly as loud as every other.

While they are stacked, the score you are working on is always on top and never buried. To pull a different one out, switch to that tab and open this box from there.

The two sliders below each control one direction, and both show a percentage on the right:

• Left / right — swings this score around you at a constant distance. Dead centre is straight ahead; there is a tick mark there, and the slider snaps to it once you get close (the readout becomes 0%)
• Volume — pushes this score nearer or further, and the angle does not change. Anywhere inside the innermost ring reads 100% (distance does not count in there). 0% is not silence; it is the quietest this stage goes

Reset placement moves this score back to straight ahead (left / right re-centred too) and leaves every other score alone.

The MML text pane

On a desktop the three tracks sit side by side (Melody / Harmony 1 / Harmony 2), which makes them easy to line up. Whichever one you click becomes the roll's focus, and the one being edited has a brighter border.

The top right of each track is its counter: N notes · N/limit chars. That is the count after export, with spaces and line breaks excluded, so you can use line breaks to separate bars freely. Going over the limit turns it red, but nothing stops you carrying on editing.

This is a hard limit set by the game. The number shown on screen is the limit actually in force — where it disagrees with this table, believe the screen.

Status bar

The bottom line. It is all "what is true right now"; there is nothing to press:

Two more appear in the middle only when needed: parse warnings (unrecognised characters, pitches out of range and so on), and the persistent tempo mismatch notice — that one has the button that fixes it right beside it.

Settings drawer

The Settings button in the title bar; Esc closes it. Top to bottom:

Mixdown MP3 export

The separate button next to the format dropdown in the File panel. It is not the same kind of thing as the three formats above it:

The stage: a view from above

The dialog it opens is called Mixer spatial layout. The picture in the middle is a room seen from above:

• The rounded rectangles are instruments, coloured to match their tabs, with two lines on them: the score name and the instrument name. Drag one to move it
• The small circle in the middle is you, and it drags too. The rings follow you — they show how far away things are from you
• The top of the picture is straight ahead of you. The little triangle above the circle says exactly that — it never rotates, because which way you face never changes. To put an instrument behind you, drag it below the circle

The instrument name on the label earns its place: deciding who stands where is a decision about instruments (bass at the back, melody in the middle), not about "score 3".

Drag something further away and it gets quieter and moves off to that side. At the far edge it is about half as loud; no instrument ever disappears completely, and dragging one right on top of the circle will not blow your ears out either.

Who appears on the stage is decided by whether there are any notes:

The layout is remembered and is still there next time (stored in this browser along with the score, so autosave needs to be on). To start over press Reset layout: the instruments go back to the default arc and the listener returns to their original spot.

Listen before you export

There is a row with ▶ Preview, a progress slider and a time. It plays exactly what the export will give you, so you can drag instruments around while it is playing and hear the change immediately.

Two things differ from ordinary playback:

• It plays the whole piece and ignores the playback start and end lines on the roll. Those are a tool for auditioning a passage; the export ignores them, so this does too
• Closing the dialog removes the spatial effect completely — ordinary playback afterwards will not carry it

Headphones or speakers

The default is headphones: front, back, left and right all come through, and it sounds best.

Tick Speaker mode to switch to the algorithm meant for speakers. The cost is written next to the tickbox: front and back get flattened — only left and right survive, so dragging something behind the circle sounds the same as dragging it in front. It is the more natural choice when playing through speakers, but arranging depth becomes pointless.

Pressing Start export

The button turns into a progress bar in place. The stage does not disappear, the layout stays visible, and Cancel sits beside it. Cancelling is immediate and puts everything back the way it was.

The filename comes from the field at the top of the File panel, shared with the other exports.

The download starts automatically when it finishes, and the stage stays open — this is an arrange-export-listen-rearrange loop, and closing it automatically would mean reopening it every time. That is a deliberate difference from the other exports, which close on the way out.

Make MP4 video

The bottom button in the export area, Make MP4 video. What comes out is a piano waterfall video — notes falling from the top, splashing effects as they land on the keyboard — ready to post on social media.

Pressing it opens the video page in a new tab; the editor stays exactly where it was. No sign-in, and no need to share the score first: the score is handed over inside your own browser, and the short string in the address bar is only a key to it.

On the video page you can pick the colours, the note style and the landing effect, and there is a stage just like the mixdown one for arranging positions. The picture is always 16:9 landscape. Press download and it shows progress as it computes.

Narrow screens and phones

As the screen narrows, things fold away rather than disappear:

• The right of the title bar becomes a single hamburger button, with Clipboard / File / Share / Settings / About inside that panel
• The title bar gains four display toggles (invisible on a desktop): Show toolbar / Show piano roll / Show editor / Show status bar. Turning an area off gives its space to the rest. What each one does is in the four display toggles
• The three tracks go from side by side to stacked; narrower still and they become one at a time, switched with the small tabs above the editing area

There are two triggers: a very narrow screen, or a very short one — so a phone held sideways (wide but short) gets this layout too, and so does a desktop window squashed flat.

This section is about layout, and has nothing to do with whether you are using a mouse or your fingers. A squashed desktop window looks like this too, and there you still have a mouse — every shortcut and every right-click menu above is still there.

Using your fingers brings a whole separate set of things — tap, press and hold to pick a note up, two-finger zoom, and the control panel that rises from the bottom of the screen once a note is selected. Those are in writing music on a phone or tablet.