Today we’ve made some big improvements to the way sheet music is displayed on Soundslice. The details are rather geeky, but the upshot is that music across our site should be easier to read and use space more efficiently.

Traditionally our system has used separate “margins” for various bits of notation. Things like chord names, tempo markings, directions and text have been positioned at the same vertical level — not necessarily close to the staff. Sometimes this approach worked well, other times it caused too much awkward whitespace.

Today’s improvements fix that. We’ve completely rewritten our positioning algorithms to be much more sophisticated.

The best way to demonstrate the improvements is by example. Here are several before-and-after screenshots:

Because Soundslice is web-based and draws its notation automatically based on your device, you don’t need to do anything to take advantage of these changes. If you’ve created slices, chances are they’ll look a bit better now. Just reload the page, and the new changes will take effect.