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Can you make dotted notes?

I have this MIDI song called "Royally Mischievous" and I decided I wanted to learn how to make SMW music to see how it would sound, and because I just love SMW music so much.

Turns out Tinymml isn't what I can call 'relliable' so I turned to learning how to make it from the ground up on a text file. It was then that I noticed in Supertails' tutorial there was nothing about adding dotted notes, simple, double, triple, regardless, there was no info on how to do it. Can I actually make dotted notes? I really don't want to resort to a tie because it's not going to sound good on a harpsichord.
If you follow this tutorial, it includes information about triplet note lengths, so you might want to check that out.

Ties in SMW aren't really a thing, though: the ^ command is specifically for adding note lengths together, so you shouldn't be afraid to use it for something like a dotted half note, which would look like this:
Code
c2^4

Just don't try to use it like a tie. It won't work if you change pitches with something like c2^d4 or similar.
That tutorial explains dotted notes well. Just look at the examples it has to get a pretty good scope of how the . command and the ^ command can be used, both separately and in conjunction.
BTW, you might want to try PetiteMM, it may be able to deal with your midi's dotted note lengths better. Not sure how it does those kind of things, though. In any case, porting by hand is not a totally bad idea either, as you'll have to manually optimize by hand anyway whether you use a converter or not. Granted a converter is easier, but having working knowledge of the script is very helpful.
Make more of less, that way you won't make less of more!
Originally posted by musicalman
BTW, you might want to try PetiteMM, it may be able to deal with your midi's dotted note lengths better.

Just make sure your MIDI is exactly correct with its note lengths. PetiteMM is quite picky about what it actually converts, and the formatting is all wrong for some reason, so you'll have to fix it manually.
Originally posted by MrMrMANGOMILK
Just make sure your MIDI is exactly correct with its note lengths. PetiteMM is quite picky about what it actually converts, and the formatting is all wrong for some reason, so you'll have to fix it manually.

I didn't do a thorough test (in case it's lenient) but you should probably make certain of these 3 things.

1. Your channels are numbered 1-8.... ideally
2. Channels are monophonic. Don't include chords, remove them. I cannot attest to the behavior of chords but it'll likely use one of the two notes. Not by random but consistently the top/bottom.
3. Don't use more than 64th notes when each beat is a quarter note.

There are command-line parameters to making PetiteMM behave "better."
Code
java -jar PetiteMM.jar --dots 1 --octave-reverse myMidi.mid
--dots 1 will limit the amount of dotted dotted notes to 1. Example is you might have a note that looks like this
Code
c4...
--dots 1 = c2.
Using --dots 1 generally looks nicer. Apparently the program outputs the wrong octaves which is why we add --octave-reverse. You can also adjust the timebase which can effect the mml output. If the midi's tempo is too fast you won't be able to get the MML to proper speeds, thus using a higher timebase can change a c4 to a c8 effectively halving your required tempo.

I think it's good to write code by hand but it seems the program, PetiteMM, gets way too much negative flack.