Today we’ve added two ways to control Soundslice playback, including a metronome count-in.

Previously, whenever you pressed Play in a Soundslice score, it would immediately play the music. Now, you have the option of specifying a count-in before the playback starts.

This is useful if you’re using Soundslice to play along with a recording. It gives you a few moments to get your instrument ready, and hear the tempo, as opposed to immediately jumping into the music.

Activate the count-in by clicking the new arrow icon next to the Play button:

You may be wondering: what tempo does the count-in use? We’re doing a nice bit of magic there — it uses whatever the tempo of the recording is, at the moment at which your playhead is set. This means it does the right thing in case of tempo variations and recordings that weren’t recorded with click tracks. (Behind the scenes, it uses Soundslice syncpoint data.)

We’ve also added a “Play once” option, which several people have requested. If you’ve created a selection by dragging over notation, our default behavior is to repeat the given bit of audio infinitely. But sometimes, especially for particularly short passages, looping can be more confusing than helpful. The “Play once” option tells Soundslice not to loop audio in your selection.

Finally, as a part of this, we’ve changed our metronome sound to be significantly louder. A bunch of Soundslice users had written us saying the previous metronome was too soft.