MIDI to MML

Turning an existing piece into something Mabinogi can play

Why it cannot just be converted

MIDI and MML differ enormously in what they can express, and that is the root of the whole business:

So conversion is fundamentally about giving things up: at every moment, one note out of several is kept. What comes out is always less than the original; the only question is whether what went missing is the part you cared about — and that is exactly what the capture mode decides.

Step by step

1. Click File in the editor's title bar
2. Pick your .mid file in the import section
3. The file box closes itself and is replaced by the track list
4. Tick the rows you want, and choose a capture mode for each one
5. Press Import

Importing does not replace, it appends — existing tracks are not overwritten. To bring in different voices in several passes, just repeat it.

Reading the track list

Each row in the list is shown in the form Ch 3 · Bright Acoustic Piano. Two things are worth explaining:

One row is not one channel

A row stands for one (MIDI track, channel) pair, not simply a channel. The reason is that piano scores often write the left and right hands as two tracks sharing a single channel — merging by channel would fold the two hands together, and the capture would have to choose between them, giving you something unlistenable.

By the same token, a track is not split apart just because it changes instrument part-way. Mabinogi cannot change instrument mid-track anyway, so splitting would not express the change either; it would just consume two track slots and leave both half empty. Rows like this are marked "▸ N instruments" as a heads-up.

What is shown is the GM instrument, not the track name

That is deliberate. A track name is free text typed by a person; the GM instrument is written by a machine and is what a player actually sounds. Files really encountered in the wild:

You use this row to decide the capture mode (which one for the piano, which one for the bass), and choosing by a name that may well be wrong means choosing wrong. The track name is only shown as a fallback, when the file records no instrument at all.

Channel 10 is the drum kit: it is marked "Percussion" and left unticked by default. Mabinogi has no equivalent drum kit, and forcing the conversion gives you nothing but a string of meaningless pitches.

The three capture modes

The mode decides one thing and one thing only: when several notes sound at the same instant, which one is kept.

Two consequences worth remembering:

• For a monophonic voice, both modes give exactly the same result. A bass, a melody line or a solo only ever has one note at a time, so the choice makes no difference.
• "The long note disappeared" is not a fault, it is the wrong mode. Take an eighth-note ornament sitting on top of a whole note: Favour melody captures the ornament line, Favour root captures the held note. Which one you want is your decision, not something the program should guess.

Broken chords are captured correctly

The capture rule is that any new note entering cuts off the note currently sounding, whether the new one is higher or lower. So a broken chord — notes entering staggered and released together (C → E → G) — is captured as c16 e16 g2.. rather than as the highest note G throughout. Had the rule been "take the highest note in each span", arpeggios would vanish entirely.

The track budget

At most 15 tracks can be imported at a time, and it counts the total — a row set to "Melody + root" counts as two. Going over shows a red line telling you by how many, and the import button is disabled.

What to check after importing

1. Play it through first. The capture rule has no notion of "wrong"; a bad capture raises no error, it just sounds odd.
2. Look at the character count. An import usually comes out over the game's limit. If it does, see the next point.
3. Use Optimise in the toolbar to bring it down. It is the only function in the whole editor that changes the sound — what it moves is note length (holding on or releasing early), and it never moves any note's start time, so the rhythm cannot be structurally broken. Only one of the three rules can run at a time, and it tells you how many characters it saved.
4. Check the instruments. Importing does not pick Mabinogi instruments for you; choose them yourself on the tabs.
5. Set the velocities. Drop the accompaniment tracks a few steps so the melody can come through.

Known limitations

• Triplets come out crooked. On import every note is first snapped to a 1/32-note grid — that is what lets a human-played chord (three notes a few ticks apart) be recognised as simultaneous, and what makes every cell of the piano roll line up. The price is that eighth-note triplets do not land on the grid. It is a deliberate trade: better to snap than to capture a note the roll cannot fix.
• Pitch bend, pedal and velocity curves are ignored. Mabinogi MML has no such things.
• Tempo changes are kept, but remember that tempo is shared by the whole piece (see the MML syntax guide).
• An imported result does not need compressing again. The last step of the importer's MML generation is the compressor itself, so Lossless will not save you another character. If it shows as over the limit it really is over, and the only options are Optimise or deleting things yourself.