Editor Reference and Keyboard Shortcuts

Every button and every key, all in one place

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

Two worlds: focus decides the keyboard

The editor has two places you can work in — the piano roll and the MML text pane — and they share one keyboard. There is only one rule:

The keys on the roll side share one precondition: something has to be selected. Delete, +/- and Ctrl+C/X all act on "the notes you selected", and with no selection nothing happens at all.

Also, the whole set stands down while a dialog is open: with the Velocity box open, Delete will not delete the notes behind it and 3 will not quietly change the note length.

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

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: on the bar ruler, or in Select only mode on empty space in the roll — left click sets the start, right click sets the end. You can also move the range live on the ruler during playback.

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.

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 — and only notes of a beat or more, extended by at most a quarter of their original length, with rests 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; 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.

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 15 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 at the far right of the title bar; Esc closes it. Top to bottom:

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 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 — vertical space is the scarcest thing on a small screen, so turn the editing area off if you only want to draw notes, and turn the roll off if you only want to type. Lit means currently visible
• 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.

Playback and viewing are both fine on a phone, so opening a share link just to hear it works perfectly well. But the editor is designed for a mouse and keyboard — no right click, no shortcuts, and dragging is awkward — so for serious writing use a computer; see the FAQ.

Full shortcut tables

Piano roll keyboard

Mouse and wheel

Everywhere