Storage and limits
Tabula caps how large a single song and a single account can get. You are very unlikely to meet either — the numbers are set well above real music — but if you do, the editor says so plainly and there’s a way back.
The numbers
Section titled “The numbers”| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| One song | 32 MB |
| One account, across every band it owns | 1 GB |
| Bands you can own | 50 |
| Any single piece of text in a song (a title, a lyric, a credit) | 4 KB |
The per-account total counts the bands you own, not the ones you’ve been invited to. Being a member of somebody else’s band costs you nothing.
Why a song is capped at all
Section titled “Why a song is capped at all”The ceiling isn’t about disk space — it’s about what your browser can open. A song of this kind costs roughly 21 bytes of browser memory per stored byte, so a 32 MB song is already around 650 MB of memory and takes a few seconds to open. A larger one would load slowly or not at all, on your machine and on your bandmates’.
For scale: a sparse 20-track, hour-long score comes to about 26 MB and fits. Ordinary band songs are 5 to 50 times smaller than the cap. You will not reach it by writing music.
What reaching a limit looks like
Section titled “What reaching a limit looks like”A write that would cross a ceiling is refused, not truncated — Tabula tells you rather than quietly dropping the note. Your song is not damaged and nothing already written is lost; the editor simply stops accepting new content until there’s room.
Compacting a song
Section titled “Compacting a song”Every edit anyone makes is recorded so that real-time collaboration works and nothing gets clobbered. Over a long editing life — especially one involving a lot of deleting — that history accumulates, and a small amount of it can never be shed automatically.
Compact This Song…, from the Song menu or the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P), rebuilds the song from what the editor currently reads and throws away the accumulated history behind it. The music is identical afterwards; the stored size usually drops a lot.
This is the intended way back from the song ceiling. What it costs, and what it doesn’t:
- Your comments survive. They stay anchored to the same beats and measures — the anchors are part of the music, and they travel with it.
- Undo history is gone. The document is new afterwards, so you can’t undo back past the compact. Everyone’s editor reloads the song. The confirmation dialog says both before you commit.
- Do it when nobody’s mid-edit. Compacting sends the document your editor is holding, and the server refuses if it knows about anything your editor hasn’t seen — so a compact attempted while a bandmate is typing declines rather than losing their work. Try again once things settle.
- It can’t shrink content. Compacting removes accumulated history, not music. A song that’s over the ceiling on its actual content alone can’t be helped this way, and Tabula tells you so rather than appearing to work.
If you’re near the account ceiling rather than a song’s, compacting your largest songs is the first thing to try; after that, export anything you’ve finished with as NSF for safekeeping and delete it from the band.