Over the past month, we’ve rolled out several improvements to how our music looks — plus some new functionality in our notation editor. Here’s an overview.

Slur positions

Our system has always used built-in rules to determine whether slurs should be displayed above or below a staff.

Now, you can manually override our automatic positioning. Use the new “Toggle slur side” button in our notation editor.

You can also assign a custom keyboard shortcut for this, if you’d like.

Relatedly, we now preserve the slur position for any music you import from MusicXML files going forward. (Previously, we ignored that information.)

Better accidental positioning with multiple voices

Previously, in music with multiple voices, our rendering engine was quite naive about accidentals, resulting in ugly clashes like this:

Now, we take multiple voices into account when positioning accidentals, to ensure they don’t collide:

Much better!

On a similar note, our rendering engine is now smarter about whether an accidental is strictly necessary in a multiple-voice context.

In this example, the second A♭ isn’t necessary, because it’s already been made active by the first note in the bar:

That’s how we used to render it, because our algorithm for accidentals didn’t properly take multiple voices into account. Now, we do the right thing and hide that second accidental:

Of course, you can still manually display the accidental if you’d like. Which brings us to...

Forced accidentals

Previously, our system would only display an accidental if it was absolutely necessary, or if you specified a cautionary accidental within parentheses. Now, you have the ability to force the display of any accidental.

To do this, just highlight the note in our notation editor and click one of the accidental buttons.

In addition, we’ll now detect forced accidentals for any music you import from MusicXML going forward.

Cautionary time signatures

We now display a cautionary time signature at the end of a stave, if the first bar in the next stave has a different time signature:

Note that our system lays out notation according to your device’s screen size and your current zoom level — so cautionary time signatures will appear automatically when the situation presents itself.