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.

I want to do X — which section

Title bar

The top line. The site name on the left, and four ways in and out 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

MMI, other MML files and pasted content undergo lossless restoration of MabiIcco's compressed non-standard durations. For example, C21R.R19.C2 can become the timing-equivalent c32.rr8.r64c2. If exact note timing cannot be preserved, the entire original track is retained for correction. Editing, saving and exporting remain available; export only warns about Mobile compatibility and never rounds durations.

Lossless compression has an independent search budget per track. Excluding whitespace and comments, tracks of up to 4000 characters receive 200,000 steps; longer tracks receive 400,000. Exhausting this budget is reported and does not mean no shorter result exists.

Three 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 to MML.

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.

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 note icon button remains available on phones: choose a note length, then tap the icon to toggle dots for the next notes you draw. To change existing notes, long-press a note and use its menu.

Dotted sixty-fourths are excluded only from the drawing and dot tools. Imported or handwritten l64. is preserved and is not treated as illegal MML.

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 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 move notes out of range it does nothing, and tells you how many notes fall past the top or the bottom.

Optimise

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

What the middle three 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 two exceptions worth remembering: Lossless always recomputes the whole track and ignores the 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; during a drag the arrow keys fine-tune by half a cell (only left and right do anything while resizing). 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".

Reading the picture

• Solid notes are the track you are editing; other tracks in the same score are outlined, and other scores fainter still. Colour is by score
• Selected notes take on an obvious background. 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, rows outside that key are dimmed. It is only a hint and blocks nothing
• Bar lines are always drawn as 4/4. You are told when an imported file is in another time signature, and the bars in the roll will not line up in that case
• During playback, whatever the playhead passes over lights up

Selecting, deleting, clipboard

Read-only tracks

When an imported score contains unrecognised characters, that track's roll is read-only — nothing can be drawn or dragged. The text is still editable, and clearing those characters restores it.

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 / add a section mark. 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 four 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 four rows on its own. Inserting or deleting across three tracks 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 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, with About to its right; Esc closes it. Top to bottom:

Mixdown MP3 export

In the export block of the File box, the separate button below Download. It is not the same kind of thing as the three formats above it:

The stage: a view from above

The box that opens is called Spatial mixer. The picture in the middle is a room seen from directly above:

• Each rounded card is an instrument, coloured like its tab, with two lines on it: the track 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 things are from where you are sitting
• Up on the screen is straight ahead. The little triangle on top of the circle says exactly that, and it never rotates, because your facing never changes. To put an instrument behind you, drag it below the circle

The instrument name on the card earns its place: you decide who stands where by instrument (bass at the back, melody in the middle), not by "track 3". Drag one further away and it gets quieter and moves off to that side; at the very edge it is roughly half as loud, nothing ever disappears completely, and dragging one onto the circle will not blow up. Tracks with no notes are not drawn.

The layout is remembered and is still there next time. To start over press Reset layout: the instruments go back to the default arc, the listener goes home, and the spatial mix is switched off too.

Listen before you export

The box has a Preview row with a scrubber and a clock. It plays exactly what the export will give you, so you can drag instruments while it runs and hear the change immediately.

Three things differ from ordinary playback:

• It plays the whole piece, ignoring the start and end lines on the roll. Those are a tool for auditioning a passage; the export ignores them, so this does too
• Only the first 6 tracks sound, and mute is ignored — the preview has to be the same thing as the file or it is useless. Your own mutes come back when you close the box
• Closing this box removes the spatial effect completely; ordinary playback afterwards does not carry it

Headphones or speakers

This only matters once the spatial mix is ticked. The default is headphones: front, back, left and right all come through, and it sounds best.

Tick Speakers to switch to the algorithm meant for speakers. The cost is printed next to the box: front/back collapses — only left and right survive, and an instrument dragged behind the circle sounds the same as one in front. Over speakers this is the more natural choice, but placing things front to back stops meaning anything.

Pressing Export

The button turns into a progress bar in place: the stage stays, the layout stays visible, and Cancel sits beside it. Cancelling is immediate and puts everything back as it was. The file name comes from the field at the top of the File box, shared with Save.

It downloads when it is done, and the stage stays open — this is a place, export, listen, place again loop, and closing it automatically would mean reopening it every time. That is a deliberate difference from Save, which closes.

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.