Here’s a new feature that several people have requested: you can now customize bar numbering in your slices.

Before this change, bar numbering in Soundslice was simple and “dumb.” The first bar was labeled as number 1, and the number increased by one for each subsequent bar. There was no way to change that.

Now, you can use our notation editor to override the bar numbers however you’d like. For example, you might want to:

• Change the bar number to 0 for a pick-up bar, so that the first full bar gets marked as bar 1 instead of 2.
• Reset the bar number to 1 for each lick/phrase within a larger lesson.
• Change the first bar’s number to a larger number, to communicate that it’s an excerpt of a longer piece.

Here’s an example of the second idea:

This slice includes two licks, and we’ve reset the bar number for the second lick (hence the bar number “1” at the start of the second stave).

If you’ve overridden a bar number, all subsequent bars will be labeled relative to your override — so you only need to override one bar. For example, if you change the first bar’s number to “9,” the second bar will automatically be labeled as bar 10, and so on, without you needing to override the subsequent bars.

If you’ve overridden a bar number, the number will always be displayed in notation. Otherwise, we only render bar numbers for the first bar in each stave. Eventually we plan to add a “Display bar number for each bar” setting.

You’ll find the new “Override bar number” feature in our notation editor (see the help page here). We’ve also improved our MusicXML importer to automatically detect custom bar numbers for any MusicXML files you upload moving forward.