Songs & importing

Every instrument ships with bundled collections (Czerny, Beyer, Hanon, machine drum patterns, public-domain melodies…), and you can bring your own scores in three ways — from a single file to a whole library.

The song picker

Collections sit in the left rail; pieces on the right. Each piece row shows your best recorded precision, and a 📥 chip to save it for offline use (💾 = cached; click again to evict).

Load a single MEI file

📁 Local MEI File in the picker’s footer opens one score straight from disk. It plays like any bundled piece for the session, but isn’t stored — use a ZIP import for that.

Import a ZIP of scores

📦 Import ZIP takes a ZIP containing MEI files and installs it as a new collection named after the ZIP file — My Songs.zip becomes the collection My_Songs under the current instrument. What you should know:

• It’s permanent and on-device. The files are unpacked into the app’s private storage (OPFS), so the collection survives restarts and works offline. It belongs to that app on that device — the desktop app and your browser each keep their own, and neither is synced anywhere.
• Anything reasonable works: nested folders inside the ZIP are flattened, non-MEI files and macOS metadata are ignored.
• Imported collections show a 📦 marker in the rail and a 🗑 chip to delete them from the device.
• Importing a same-named ZIP again merges into the existing collection (same-named files are replaced) — handy for updating a set.
• Stats accumulate per piece exactly like bundled songs.

Your MEI files need no special preparation

Earlier versions required every score to start with a special “measure zero” (a one-beat rest used to place the clef, key and time signature and give a count-in). That’s no longer needed: if the first measure of an imported score contains actual notes, the app injects the count-in measure automatically at load time, for single files and ZIP imports alike. Scores that already have a notes-free first measure load unchanged.

Beyond that, any MEI that Verovio can render works — including scores exported from MusicXML converters. Ties, pickup measures, meter changes and irregular bars are all handled by the synchronization engine.

The score server (LAN)

For practicing from a shared library — say, a tablet at the piano and the library on your desktop — the picker can connect to a small score server (see server/ in the repository). Once connected, the catalog and files come from the server, and the footer gains an upload form to push MEI files into server-side categories. Imported (📦) collections stay available while connected; they’re always local.

Offline

The desktop app carries the app shell and the engraving engine with it, so it starts with no network at all; only lesson videos and the piano samples need to be fetched. In the browser the same holds through the PWA: the shell, the engraving engine and any pieces you’ve cached (📥) or imported (📦) keep working offline.