The Sequencer, Custom Disks and the Disk Press

Composition in NeroNotes happens inside the Soundforge — walk through a charged Harmonic Gate and the arrival platform now carries a full composing studio. Everything below only works inside the Soundforge; outside it, these blocks are decorative.

All block textures are generated placeholders and every instrument voice aliases a vanilla sound event in this release.

The Transport Lectern#

The matte-black console beside the return gate. Using it opens the sequencer: a paged note grid that edits your personal session score — a composition that belongs to you and survives trips home, logouts and server restarts.

• Note grid — click a cell to place or remove a note on the active layer. Notes from your other layers show dimmed in their voice colours. ◀/▶ page through time, ▲/▼ shift the visible octave.
• Layers — up to 4 layers, each with its own voice. L1–L4 select the active layer, +L/-L add and remove layers, and the voice button cycles the active layer's voice.
• Tempo — -/+ adjust the BPM. Any tempo plays, but Minecraft schedules audio on its 50 ms game-tick grid: a score tick lasts 60000 / (BPM × 4) ms (the sequencer uses 4 score ticks per beat), and only tempos where that duration is a whole multiple of 50 ms land every note exactly on the grid — 75, 100, 150 and 300 BPM are the practical tick-perfect choices (200, 150, 100 and 50 ms per tick respectively). New sessions default to 150 BPM. Other tempos (like 120 BPM, 125 ms per tick) still play, but each note rounds to the nearest game tick — up to ±50 ms, which can be audible as a subtle limp on fast material.
• Loop — [ sets the loop start at the current page, ] sets the loop end after it, × clears the loop. A looping score repeats on a Resonator; a preview always plays once through.
• Preview — plays your session once, in place, through your own dedicated preview channel — synchronised like any other playback, and subject to the same nearby-channel cap.
• Size gauge — shows the serialised size of your session against the server's disk budget, so an over-budget press is never a surprise.

Every edit is validated by the server. The client only proposes; the server's copy of your session is always the real one.

Pattern walls and voice pedestals#

The platform's in-world selection surfaces, for composing without leaving the world:

• Pattern walls (north rim, one per layer slot) — tap one to make its layer your active layer; it flashes to confirm. Sneak-tap retunes the wall itself to another layer slot.
• Voice pedestals (south rim, one per voice family) — tap one to cycle your active layer through that family's voices. Sneak-tap retunes the pedestal to the next family.

Blank disks#

A Blank Resonant Disk is craftable in survival: copper ingots around Plasma Glass, with an amethyst shard below (yields 2). It carries no data — it is the Disk Press's raw material.

The Disk Press#

The block on the other side of the gate. Using it opens the press screen:

1. Put a blank disk in the input slot.
2. Type a title. Titles are validated by the server: a configurable length limit (48 characters by default), control characters and formatting codes stripped, and an optional server word list.
3. Choose your credit: Credited to you (default) or Anonymous. Publishing anonymously is a first-class choice — an anonymous disk stores no display name at all, and no tooltip, label or listing will ever name you.
4. Press.

The pressed Resonant Disk takes your title as its name, coloured by the composition's dominant voice family, with a glowing label. Its tooltip shows the composer ("By …" or "By an anonymous composer"), the layer/note counts and the tempo.

The size budget#

A disk holds at most disk.score_budget_bytes of serialised score (16 KiB by default; the server can raise it to a hard ceiling of 64 KiB). An over-budget score is refused with a message naming both the actual size and the limit — the press never trims or truncates a composition.

What a pressed disk can do#

• Play it at home — right-click a Resonator with the disk in hand to load its composition (the disk is read, not consumed), then right-click to play.
• Publish it — take it to the Publish Lectern to share it in the server-wide library, where other players can copy it through the Disk Exchanger.

Still deliberately out of this release: real-audio import, .ogg files (all voices alias vanilla sounds), MIDI import, and in-world note placement — the sequencer GUI at the lectern is the composing surface, with the walls and pedestals as in-world selection aids.

Configuration#